Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over
(newyorker.com)339 points by FinnLobsien 13 hours ago
339 points by FinnLobsien 13 hours ago
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.
> 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.
> 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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
> [...] 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
It think the second paragraph sort of agrees with you.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want"
I might fine tune this to "users most likely to click ads"
> 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.
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.
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.
Casinos say gambling is what people want. Tobacco companies say cigarettes is what people want. Drug dealers say fent is what people want.
On the flip side, there hasn't been enough worthwhile posts from friends in years.
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.
> 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
They actually made it even easier to find recently on mobile. Right there at the bottom.
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.
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
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.
Are kids really that simplistically divided?
100%.
iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.
it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with goths"
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.
Yes. WhatsApp isn't as popular in the US. Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat.
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.
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.
> 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."
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).
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.
Non-iMessage chats are also segregated by color, a visual affordance that identifies you as a member of the non-Apple outgroup. The other.
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.
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.
>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).
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
Facebook had and still has visibility options, but as it grew in features people forgot about it. A lesson in discoverability and product complexity.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/...
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Not if they think long-term they should focus on retaining users so they can be shown ads forever.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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_?
Looking for cause and effect in a feedback loop is a fool's errand
This is why I left Facebook and I'm sure it drove away many others.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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..
Kind of on that subject: https://directing.attention.to/p/why-is-no-one-making-a-new-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.is/UnNjh