Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over
(newyorker.com)530 points by FinnLobsien 5 days ago
530 points by FinnLobsien 5 days 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.
> 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.
> 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)
> 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.
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
> 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.
Zuckerbeg’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.
In recent years, operating it successfully despite burning through billions for their metaverse boondoggle, sure
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.
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.
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.
> [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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And metrics and growth was driven by the new ability to make discussions out of posted content (i.e. Web 2.0)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
> … 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.
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.
>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.
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.
Casinos say gambling is what people want. Tobacco companies say cigarettes is what people want. Drug dealers say fent is what people want.
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.
Meta was losing to TikTok so they had to adapt by promoting brain rot[1]
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.
https://archive.is/UnNjh