Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over
(newyorker.com)529 points by FinnLobsien 4 days ago
529 points by FinnLobsien 4 days ago
> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down. The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore.
Is that really the only problem? How many taps/clicks do you need to get there? Can you make it the default? And how obvious is it that it actually exists?
I used to be TL of the Facebook News Feed.
People in UX research told us constantly they wanted the feed to be about friends, and chronological.
Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.
So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
I really appreciate the reply, thanks for sharing that.
> Every time all the usage metrics tanked.
What if that's exactly what people want? Less usage of Facebook (horrifying, I know -- it can't be true, right?), with a focus on friends etc. when they do use it? I know you'll dislike the analogy, but isn't all that different from smoking. You think usage metrics tanking implies the outcome is bad... why exactly? Is it that unthinkable that less quantity and more quality is better for people, and what they actually want?
> So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.
You seem to be missing that the people who have the means to eat out wherever they want don't eat at McDonald's every few hours. They go in moderation. They actively want to avoid McDonald's most of the time. Once in a while they get a craving, or get super hungry and don't see other options, etc. and they cave in and go there. Of course the get the tasty unhealthy option when they go, but it's foolish to think they prefer to eat McDonald's all the time. (Do you seriously believe that??)
>Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.
Well, yeah, but this has an implicit "engagement === good" assumption. Exactly the same thing that incentivizes unhealthy McDonald's food: they make more money when they sell food that still leaves you hungry. So, yeah, people probably did want this, and when they got it they started using Facebook in a healthy manner (no point opening it at every available moment to just scroll through 'new' trash), which tanked your metrics. If you're actually worrying about your users you should also consider that them using your product more might not actually be what they want or need.
Ironically enough, I think the same mistake (or rather, it's more of a mistake because there's not quite such a naked financial incentive to make this worse for the affected users) has happened with the youtube analytics dashboard: multiple youtubers have said that it's actively addicting and really bad for their mental health, but any change that feeds that probably looks really good in their metrics because, hey, creators are using it more, that must mean it's good, right?
I'm sure there's more that could be shared about how "wants" were determined, which would counter my off-the-cusp thought here, but anyways:
Yes... my ideal would be for facebook feed to be a once-a-week addiction (maybe a bit more) where I go, see what's new, and clearly hit an end point where I know I'm seeing things I've seen before. But I'm also part of the "problem" in that I post myself maybe twice/year now.
I'd suspect the current doomscroll-y feed like we have now/you were working on reduces my likelihood of "interacting" with friends' posts. "Do I make the effort of commenting, or lazily keep scrolling to the next-often-good 3rd party content?"
A year or two ago, I copied some greasemonkey type script off reddit, and that nuked all the non-friend content off my feed, but that stopped working a couple months later and I haven't been strongly enough motivated to find an updated approach. I have little enough friend activity that I'd easily notice when I hit old content.
The current doomscrolling feed of algo content sure does manage to hook me, so that's a nice indicator of the current team being successful :P
Did you consider that you are gaming your own setup rules of measurement?
It's like "look nobody is ragebaited anymore, that's very bad for clicks"
Guess what, you should not have used that as a means of measurement before, but it was the cheapest way to sell it to advertisers.
If you have incentive to create a shithole of engagement, it's what you will get in return.
There's an old saying: you can never get enough of what doesn't fill your need.
For example, when you need sleep, you can't eat enough to make you not tired, but you may well pound a lot of caffeine and sugar.
If true, this would accomodate the simultaneous truths that:
(a) users accurately report their preference chronological friend connection when they come to a social feed
(b) users spend more time engaging with a social feed when the need they come to fill has irregularly payoffs
That you can get more engagement by not giving them what they want/need (or giving them what they need irregularly) wouldn't mean that they are lying to you, it would simply mean that engagement and social payoff curves aren't the same, and the incentives to drive one might not optimize the other.
You're saying that users weren't using the app enough like it's a bad thing. Users saw the tool as useful and used it.
My facebook bookmark takes me to https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
I still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that I've seen already.
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.
I've bookmarked the friends feed and the groups feed ( https://www.facebook.com/?filter=groups&sk=h_chr ) which saves me a LOT of aggravation.
They actually made it even easier to find recently on mobile. Right there at the bottom.
You might be interested in FreeFollow.org [full disclosure, I'm one of the engineers working on it].
It combines the economic model of web hosting (users pay to host spaces, reading is free, and writing in someone else's space is also free), the simple UI of social media (you have a profile and write posts), and the E2EE security model of 1Password (we actually implemented their published security model). It's also a non-profit so there's no pressure from owners to exploit users.
It's aimed primarily at parents of young kids who are annoyed at constantly sharing via text groups, but non-parents are also surprisingly into it.
You have some similar ideas to the encrypted social network in the Peergos protocol. We'd love to chat and see if there is scope for collaboration.
Thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce that with the current version of Firefox, but if you'd like to email us at hello@freefollow.org we'll add you to the list manually.
> There has actually been a friends-only feed on FB for years. Timelines -> Friends filters everything down.
I remember when this was called "Lists", and I carefully gathered acquaintances into lists. When I wanted to check in with particular list, I clicked on the list.
Then the lists sidebar disappeared (but you could still get the functionality if you knew the URL / argument structure).
Then the functionality disappeared.
I'm sure some product/UX staff did career making things on a metric somewhere.
> The problem? Nobody I care about posts anymore. The "flywheel" is broken.
Why post when there's no guarantee who/anyone will see it amongst a firehose of bait-y and often angry stuff?
This is part of the anti-flywheel which draws towards doomscroll.
> group chats
Group chats have the baseline virtue of knowing who your audience is.
They're missing other virtues, but that's probably another conversation.
I think they recently made a big deal about this even? The fact that they would “promote” something that likely reduces time spent scrolling and viewing of ads means that no one is going to use it as an alternative to doom scrolling. They know they got you hooked on the good stuff and are just pretending to not be the bad guys
If that friends tab is not the default tab its not going to work. Period.
Discord too. Most of my friends are on Discord, we have group chats and private servers. Many communities use Discord as their primary online hub too.
It is concerning. Discord has been slowly enshittifying for the last couple of years: ads (ex: "quests"), app bugs, etc... There is no export option and even public servers are not accessible to search engines and archives.
I’ve noticed my kid (12) primarily uses group chats over social apps. Some of his chats have several dozen kids in them. It could be social media got so bad that the protocols became the best alternative. An old programmer like me sees a glimmer of hope in a sea of noise.
It's been that way for awhile, though they do use instagram and/or tiktok for consumption.
iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
The kids have been taught the dangers of sharing things on the internet, so the risk is minimized sharing in private chats (though obviously still there).
> iMessage is (was?) a very sticky product for Apple as kids with android get cut out of chats. There's nothing worse for teens that exclusion.
Craig Federighi fought against supporting iMessage on Android and RCS for a long time saying, quote, "It would remove obstacles towards iPhone families being able to give their kids Android phones."
Whenever I hear this iMessage thing I’m surprised. Is that a US / Canada thing?
Here in Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp and/or similar products for chat and they are all multi platform.
iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).
The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.
I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.
WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding as the state of the world has changed many times over the years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where your country was better than the US for reasons that are no longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a different state is included, and typically Canada is included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp habbit as it didn't give us anything.
Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many other countries.
Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important things like get-together plans.
> 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.
I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.
The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.
I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.
The pressure should obviously be applied on the underage children with the Apple products, or better yet on Apple. Perhaps the children should be punished and have their iPhones taken away and replaced with budget android phones or flip phones.
This is good in the long run since the behavior they were engaging in puts them at odds with nearly half the population. Not only is it anti-social behavior, it's mind numbingly stupid and likely to backfire in ways that make their lives worse.
~43% of the cell phones out there in the US are Android phones. To follow their conviction against Android at all convincingly and thoroughly, they would be missing out on a lifetime of opportunities and would live a significantly diminished existence.
iPhone is not even close to being a dominant enough platform to be able to enforce this kind of social pressure against anyone but people significantly under the age of 18. Shame them, make sure they feel bad and spoiled (they should feel spoiled for being a child with an iphone), and watch them grow out up to be pro-social adults.
it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with goths"
It literally works seamlessly though? Just converts to MMS and you don't notice outside the "liked BLABLABLA" sort of messages that trickle in without the imessage emoji system.
I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home" meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).
iMessage chats also include rich media that is either degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games, invites, apple cash, etc).
This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone socially.
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.
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).
There's far too much downside to sharing your genuine thoughts, especially on politics, or things you find funny, etc. with the entire Internet because regular people and nation-state level actors will vilify you and nowadays even have you deported for things you say publicly.
That's why we all use group chats and messaging. There's no safe alternative
>It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large...
... what? I'm in my late 30's and group chats have been a part of life for myself, my friends and my family since the late 90's. I've never wanted to share my views with "the world at large" online, but I have no problem being myself and sharing my views in meatspace, where being open and honest about who I am is far more impactful to those I interact with and the world around me than it ever has been on social media.
Within the world of the pop-web, even on this website to a point, the ability to have a truly nuanced discussion has essentially been eliminated. People would rather throw out hot takes based on disingenuous interpretations of someone's comment/statement rather than try and have an impactful, open conversation.
There is nothing preventing you from expanding your group chat roster. It is just that random strangers can't drop in; you have to add them.
You would have to sacrifice the privacy of your group if you wanted to support serendipitous membership growth. Do you want to be constantly reviewing membership requests? That's what Facebook groups look like. And you have little information to judge the requests by, since the profiles can be fake, especially today. And when complete strangers can join the group, the dynamics change.
I never understood why they became less popular when mobile phones took over. Even in the 00s so many people were already in group chats through MSN, ICQ and so on.
All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app. Instead they wasted billions on Skype to replace their golden opportunity.
>?All Microsoft had to do was make the former into a proper mobile app.
I begged Microsoft to make MSN on Windows Mobile and later on Android or iPhone.
They just dont get it nor do they care. Whatsapp wasn't even a thing on Smartphone. Its dominance came a little later.
And without a smartphone or mobile network, people keep in contact especially those not in close group via Social Media aka MySpace and Facebook or Friendster.
Now smartphone ubiquitous in most places. The contact list has taken over. Social Media became a news feed.
This is actually one of the great entrepreneurship lessons of my career, which I think about a lot.
Around 2009, as smart phones were on their exponential leg up, and when I was still pretty new in the workplace, I remember thinking (and talking with my coworkers) about how messaging and chat rooms were really well suited to the technology landscape. But I lamented "too bad the space is already too crowded with options for anyone to use anything new.
But all of today's major messaging successes became household names after that! What I learned from this is that I have a tendency to think that trends are played out already, when actually I'm early in the adoption curve.
Heh, this reminds me of a vaguely related lesson I learned recently. Sold Nvidia mid-2023. "Surely everyone understands by now just how much money they're going to be making the coming 2 years, and this is already completely priced in, it's so blatantly obvious!". Heh.
Ha, someone who has money to invest asked me about an investment thesis at the end of 2022 related to the release of chatgpt. I said nvidia seemed like the most clearly likely to benefit in terms of public equities, but he said no way, it was already overpriced. :shrug:
Everything hypey overshoots eventually, but nobody knows exactly when!
I think those networks never figured out how to make money off of it. Without the tracking (and piles of VC cash) that modern social media got, the ads were not worth enough. Microsoft and AOL just saw them as cost centers so when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols they saw no value in investing in rewriting everything.
Piles of VC cash were never necessary, FWIW. Tracking, potentially. They may indeed have massively undervalued ads, or even other monetization options - Line makes millions off of emojis and such, and if they'd have been as big as Whatsapp, possibly billions. Meta too is not even tapping 5% of Whatsapp's monetization potential, FWIW. I wonder if it's intentional to prevent anti-trust concerns.
But I don't think monetization matters too much. Ms tried making the botched Skype play, and as a company there's no way they didn't understand the value of hundreds of millions of eyeballs, daily usage market share. They understood that with IE, despite it being a zero-revenue product in and of itself.
> when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols
You may know more about this then I do - what's the main difference? I used them back in the day and as end-user they felt the exact same as modern messaging apps. I send a message, it gets saved on some server, the receiver gets it from there. When I used it, it definitely didn't require both parties to be online to send/receive.
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.
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 the same for me (in my thirties). A decade ago, Instagram showed me photos that my friends shared. Today it’s ads, memes and other crap with a small proportion of photos of friends. The noise:signal ratio is so high that I don’t even bother.
Facebook was the same a long time ago.
Social media in the form it had 10-15 years ago has died. But I don’t think it’s an inevitable path: I think Meta has iterated in their services in a way that killed what was previously there.
Really makes you wonder if/when Discord goes IPO, that Meta would buy a controlling stake in it?
Fortunately there are open source alternatives even if they aren't as popular as Discord at the moment, such as Revolt Chat: https://revolt.chat/
I miss the days of self-hosted forums; sadly it seems that algorithms, and the need to satisfy the need for 'instant' connection/information are ruining forums for young newcomers...
Even facebook basically started as a group chat.
Back when we all had pet dinosaurs in our back yards and you only saw what your friends post.
This is a useful function as opposed to what the engagement algorithms push these days. So no wonder everyone moves to other options for group communication.
You mean you don't have a "where do we go out this saturday" chat group with your friends circle?
I see similar too. Both my teenagers got WhatsApp because we as parents had WhatsApp. They have slowly started using Signal in their friends groups. Now as a family we use Signal because the kids started us on it. We are based in Europe and iMessage is almost never used. I’m only on WhatsApp now because other parents are still using it. Sadly my oldest uses Instagram (on a strict daily timer), but apparently “it’s still cool to have an insta” and the killer feature there is that is super easy to network without sharing your phone number (I know signal also has this feature but it’s a bit hidden).
I think you're right, but also groupchats allow you to create cliques which facebook never really offered as a feature. What they did offer was broadcasting lists which is not the same as a clique. Groups didn't really integrate cliques well IMO as they were more "public oriented" but they are probably the closest thing.
They're both still alive.
IRC: irc.libera.chat, irc.efnet.org, something rizon something; there's technically ircnet but don't bother
Usenet: eternal-september.org - you might find others after a while but there are no other major free text servers. If you pay another company for binary access (these are mostly used for piracy) you can also use it for text though.
Kids shifting to group chats feels like a quiet rebellion against the algorithm-driven chaos of traditional social media
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.
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 :)
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram
Such a liar. Of course users will watch whatever FB shoves in their eyes. That doesn't make it a preference.
> Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage,
So his defense is that Facebook & Insta are just like youtube and tiktok. But Google is already under fire for divesting youtube, and tiktok is banned. Is that a good defense?
It depends on what you mean by "preference". If you show me a pic of a hot guy and the picture that a friend took while hiking, I'll probably look at the hot guy for longer, so one could claim I prefer it. But that doesn't mean I think it's better to spend my time like that.
Someone made the observation that the problems started when things changed from social networking (family/friend) to social media. From actually keeping up with people to 'keeping up' with content.
Turns out most people don’t have a friends and family group that can generate exciting content at a rate that most people want. The platforms oblige this with “reshares” and “you may also like” content, and eventually everyone’s like “who gives a s*t about aunt Millie’s cupcake recipe, check out this dude trying to skateboard off of the Eiffel Tower!”
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.
We went from sharing with people we knew to performing for people we don't
I've been of the opinion for the last 5 years at least, that if Meta and all of it's associated products and platforms suddenly disappear from existence, nothing of actual value will be lost. There are better competitors for everything they do. I don't think I can pinpoint one single unique thing about Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp at this stage in time. Everything they do is done or executed better by a competitor. They had some sort of advantage in the late 2000's and early 2010's, but that's it. I'm not optimistic for their future and relevance.
For better or worst, Fb has become the de facto place for cruising sailors to share information about different regions of the world. Tips, alerts, advice, questions, etc. I sail the world and there is no other place for groups quite as good for finding the information we need. There’s a niche group for every area around the world full of people sharing advice and answering questions. The good groups have great moderation and quality content.
> Discord, Whatsapp (huh!), Signal
where nothing is searchable, linkable, or otherwise legible. That's a tradeoff. It has some upsides, but downsides as well.
(granted search has been struggling to not suck in general lately, facebook among others has joined the campaign against legible links, so losses are taking place in web environments anyway)
Moving a community is much much harder than you're making it out to be. Especially when there's a long history of content and - most importantly - trust between members.
Asking people to re-learn the new modalities and UIs and where everything is etc.. particularly for a less technical crowd.
I'll reach for it - Meta increases consumer spending and has enabled a lot of small businesses to profit during the previous economic booms. Yeah they were drop shipping products from China using the de minimis exception, or hocking worthless supplements, or promoting influencer products that are no different then the generic but costs twice as much, but a lot of people made a living off an ecosystem that arguably would not exist without Meta.
Further the success of Facebook was arguably the biggest contributor to startup culture ever - I would expect we'd have seen a fraction of the growth in VC if Facebook had never come to pass.
Groups, WhatsApp, etc, would be replaced overnight with, at least initially, a worse version. More hacking, probably worse moderation at scale, worse accessibility, etc.
Meta also gentrified East Palo Alto, and the Zuckerbergs now own a substantial amount of real estate in Redwood City and elsewhere. They've made a big footprint on the peninsula that deserves credit for the now $8 lattes in my hometown.
Sure, but you can say this about every company & product in existence. Either a better version already exists, or will pop up in minutes after the current one disappears. Network effects are strong enough that this simply won't happen. Meta has close to 4 billion active users across all of its apps. That's literally half the planet.
I am keenly aware that virtually every acquaintance of my age is connected to me via Facebook. If it disappears, they all disappear. There is no replacement. There is no backup plan.
That being said, I've already cut Facebook out of my life years ago for sanity. So really, I'm just mourning what's already all but gone in my life.
It annoys me when people who have no friends say this like this applies to everyone else
It should be pretty obvious, but…
When social media started out, it was simply a feed of what you followed. FB, Twitter, Reddit, everything — they showed you a chronological list of everything that the people/groups you followed posted.
It was glorious.
But it wasn’t making money. These platforms were all funded by investors in hopes that they would someday make money.
And now they are — through ads and sponsored content that no one asked for or wants, via algorithms designed for one thing: profit.
It’s zero surprise to me that social media platforms have become the garbage that they are now.
I’ve moved on from all but a couple platforms (HN, Board Game Geek, and Bogleheads — arguably not social media platforms in the same vein as the others mentioned, because they aren’t trying to monetize, except BGG which monetizes via traditional banner ads, which I’ll take 10/10 over “content ads”).
But I have zero interest in returning to anything that injects their sponsored content in the middle of feeds.
If social media platforms can’t figure out a way to monetize without injecting this garbage, I’ll stick to these others.
I login to Instagram and I see:
- Ad promoting "investment" platform with deep fakes of personalities
- Ad from radicalized politician promoting hate speech
- Semi-naked girl promoting their "other" social media (OnlyFans)
- Ad disguised as content of some dude promoting a random restaurant
I agree with Zuckerberg, it's not social media anymore. I don't see content from any friend, only scams.
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.
If you use Firefox, try https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
Works great.
So briefly, Zuck is arguing that the social media which was Facebooks main business of 2010s no longer exists and that Facebook has now pivoted to generic content consumption, competing with YouTube, TikTok, Reddit etc.
The article says FTC is in a bind here.
IMO it's veey simple: Yes, FB shifted their focus and are now a content hose. They still have monopoly on some market(s) - not where they are competing with e.g. TikTok. Local events, marketplace, genuine personal social networks.
That doesn't mean that they don't also compete with TikTok elsewhere, where further market consolidation could be a concern.
Anyone who uses instagram should be abundantly aware of this. The default behavior of the app became "Serve you all content we think you would like, in the order we think you would enjoy it". This pretty much means "You may or may not see the content of channels/people you specifically follow".
The app went from just showing you a stream of posts from people you follow, to just showing you a stream of posts it thinks you would like.
I have the opposite problem. Every time Instagram starts in the background (allegedly to check for feed updates but probably to get my geolocation) it uses so much memory it pushes out things like my on-screen keyboard. No doubt Meta has figured out ways to manipulate Android to get priority over the keyboard, and only tested it on the very latest phones.
I use it exclusively for announcements from certain brands with e.g. seasonal rotations or sales (small shops, especially, are often way more consistent about updating one or more social media accounts, often Insta, than their website, if they even have a website) and it's such a pain in the ass for that reason. I don't trust ads or their "algorithm" to promote quality (I reckon they're more likely to promote rip-offs and fly-by-night operations) so I super don't care about anything else they want to show me, even if it's directly related to the kinds of brands I'm following. I deliberately do not do new-stuff discovery in the app, because they have incentives to screw me.
The only thing I want out of it is to see the posts made by the accounts I'm following, since the last time I checked. That's 100% of the functionality I care about, and the app goes out of its way to not deliver it.
They don’t really have a monopoly on local events or marketplace.
Facebook is popular for these things but that’s because Facebook had a big user base, not because they keep competitors from forming.
They have a network effect that smaller competitors don’t. Thus, at the end of the day it’s the user’s choices that keep Facebook a sort of monopoly in those areas.
> They don’t really have a monopoly on local events or marketplace.
Yeah, I'd say from 2004 - 2015 was the heyday for me on local events for small bands, house shows, and punk/DIY venues. Eventually FB Events died out socially by not being able to send invites to mass groups of friends/previous attendees, and attrition, and so on... A real shame for non-major venue events and the DIY scene.
Marketplace is semi-useful still, quasi-better than craigslist, but keeps getting filled with a lot of cruft of drop-shippers and scammers.
I had almost forgotten about the 2004-2015 music scene on Facebook. For me things died down around 2011 when the police started using Facebook to identify and break up unlicensed events.
> 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/...
This has been called "pulling a Myspace", back from when Myspace lost to Facebook. The sequence:
- Competition appears, usage decreases, revenue declines somewhat.
- Ad density is increased to increase revenue.
- Usage decreases further as users are annoyed by excessive ads.
- Ad density is increased even further.
- Death spiral.
How could Zuckerberg not know this? He was on the other side of it last time around.
>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.
I only have facebook for messenger, but lets look at my feed now.
1 sentence question from a page i dont follow.
Funny joke from a page i dont follow.
3dmakerpro ad
swimsuit picture of sister in law.
3d ai studio ad
anti trans post from page i dont follow
polymaker ad
Reels?
polymaker ad
picture from highschool friend
science/astronomy post from page i dont follow
planetarium ad
Less than 20% are anything I might even be interested in; the rest are pushed. I havent 3d printed in quite awhile. Astronomy is cool i guess.
SOCIAL media is over if you're on facebook.
Not if they think long-term they should focus on retaining users so they can be shown ads forever.
I support a small group of elderly people on the side. At least once of week they land on a Facebook video which then leads to the "your phone has 78 viruses" scare ad. I tell them to stop using Facebook and they look at me like I'm crazy. One of them even said, if I turn off my phone when I get that scary ad, does that keep me safe?
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years,
Yeah, because you filled the feed with garbage so obviously they don't get to see as much.
Has 'percentage of time viewing content' declined?
The unspoken thing really is: We couldn't find a way to make mega-bux on showing people content from their friends, so we stopped being a social network almost entirely so we could make mega-bux showing them garbage ads and disinformation campaigns instead.
IG was a social network that made me feel better after using it. It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.
It really sucks that every single platform is lured into the brain-attention hack of short form video and the optimization of attention quantity over interaction quality. All cycles repeat though - here’s hoping.
> “It used to be a peaceful, well presented, personally curated stream of still photos.”
Ha! This is the opposite of my experience. I feel Tumblr was superior platform for images and art on small phone for no other reason than you can easily pinch and zoom. I still prefer still images on the Tumblr platform, and my feed is filled with artists, designers, photographers and comic book covers.
I never liked the experience of viewing stills on Instagram and only when my friend started producing small videos and another friend started sending me fishing meme videos, did I start engaging. Now I do spend some time each week in Instagram (same as YouTube shorts). The platform is perfect for sharing small instructional videos. My feed is full of motorcycle mechanics hacks, fly fishing lessons, fitness instructions, and camping knots—all to my recreational interests—I’d rather be fishing.
The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't know are posting. Maybe there's a stream where I can see that, but not in MY news feed. I want to only see what my friends are doing, and maybe what is going on in a group that I belong to. Nothing else. No AI prompts or responses, no suggested friends, videos, groups, etc. To make Facebook even tangentially useful to me I have to use FBuster or other extensions to remove all of that junk.
I'd like to know how much that time spend viewing content posted by "friends" are down since 2012, because I bet it's more than in the past two years, by a lot.
There's also:
> "The F.T.C. is arguing, instead, that Meta’s purported monopoly has led to a lack of innovation and to reduced consumer choice."
Not really, because no one gave a shit about providing a good social media experience, everyone wants to copy Zuckerbergs homework.
If you want to blame Facebook/Meta for anything is it breaking the trust of people to the extend that no other social media can exist for a decade. Meta has burned the would be early adopters to the extend that they will NEVER sign up to a new social media platform ever again. Meta (and Google, Microsoft and so many others) have shown that spying on customers and selling their private data is business and now the tech savvy users that would be the first onboard and advocating are no longer signing up to anything that cannot guarantee absolute privacy.
Facebook also killed of pretty much any other marketplace, but I am interested in seeing how the newer generations are going to affect that, given that many of them doesn't have a Facebook account.
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.
Meta is an ad business. You maximize ad revenue by maximizing time spent. You maximize time spent with a slot machine that exploits our psychological weaknesses.
Meta intentionally drives this and don't forget that it's helped by millions of influencers that learned how to maximize engagement.
A good-faith Facebook with exclusively a friends-only timeline might generate 20% of the current ad revenue. And it won't matter much because the bad-faith competitor will do the dopamine approach and users will be attracted to it like flies.
My mom's area in northern Michigan got hit by a huge ice storm last month that took out hundreds of power lines and cable/internet. Facebook was the primary way the community communicated during the 5-15 day power outage. That was extremely valuable. There are a few special topic groups that are still great as well. Other than that rare situation it's been a desert.
Broadcast social media is so odd to me now. It feels like walking to the center of town and shouting about your life to everyone.
I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute, then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy.
Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I often regret it.
One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers, and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting it.
At least once a day, I type up a comment somewhere, proofread it, think about whether I really want/need to post it, and then hit the back button. I figure that next-to-last step of asking myself whether it's really something I want out there is a good habit, and if the answer is always yes, I probably haven't thought about it enough.
Glad to hear my own experienced echo'd. I've been dialing off of the stuff (even HN) for these very reasons. The staggering one is this:
> I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
One of the darker side-effects of social media is that everything now feels very ideological and "team sports." You're either "with us" or "against us," nuance has basically been obliterated. Even more shocking is that in some places, it seems like anything that's truthful/factual or plausibly truthful triggers a visceral negative reaction in people (to the point where, what used to be polite disagreement is now a rage-dump).
Social Media suffered the same fate as all companies. A constant, relentless, unnatural pursuit of growth by stripping all humanity and focusing on numbers.
Social Media has turned into an unhealthy addiction
We still need the 'organization' part. Clubs and social circles moved from blogs etc to Facebook because it was easy.
Room for a startup? A simple club hosting site, that does substantially what you get from a facebook club page. Maybe even a tool to scrape facebook and automatically create your ClubPage entry painlessly?
The key thing that Facebook Groups and Pages solved was the network effect. If you were on Facebook already, you could join a group or a page without signing up users. If a post from a Group or a Page came in, it came in through a common notification platform. It was the place where people already were, and if they weren't there, eventually there was enough pressure to join because "everyone else was already there". And all of this was good for Facebook, because it was at the time when they were trying to capture more users, which brought more eyeballs to ads.
I think any startup trying to solve this problem is going to have a really hard time because it will ultimately be external to the platforms where people already are, and user behavior has shown that they're inherently sticky to platforms. I wish it wasn't this way, because I think it'd be great for folks to be able to do this on their own.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
There are at least three others on here that I know of who live in NOLA and one in BR.
To quote David from the Acquired episode on Meta:
> I really want to keep hitting on this insight again, that Mark correctly identified of social shifting from the town square to the living room. This is a second order effect of that shift that the company didn’t see coming. Because once you shift social from the town square to the living room, it now becomes possible to divorce media from social. You’re already getting your social now in private, in your digital living room. The town square can become something that is completely not social.
Ok I am going to click on FB for the first time in a month or so. Here we go, not expecting much.
I have two notifications, one is about a birthday today, one is about someone I don't know asking me to like an AirBnB page. Let's go to the feed.
1. Sales thing from some group
2. A Boomer looking "reel" of a classic car (I don't like classic cars and nothing I have done suggests I do)
3. People You May Know (I've seen these same suggestions over the last several years, still don't know any of them and still don't want to connect)
4. Friend post, death in the family
5-9. Also friend posts
10. That exact same Boomer reel again
11-15. Friend posts or people I follow
16. "Memes Daily," which I don't follow so must be an ad
17-20. Friend posts and a group post from a group I follow
Overall, this really isn't bad, surprisingly. At one point, which is when I stopped checking it for months at a time, it was literally post after post after post from people I don't follow of the most garbage AI generated slop, like the sloppiest you can imagine. For example, the AI generated ones with the wounded soldier and a birthday cake with some message like "it's my birthday and no one came" level of slop, or an AI generated lady with an AI generated picture saying something like "this is my first painting but no one liked it," each with tens of thousands of likes and Boomers commenting things like "It's ok I am giving you a like happy birthday," just maddeningly ad infinitum and nausea-inducing.
So, maybe they fixed the above. Still, I can live without Facebook so am not planning on going back.
Or they only show a few friends' posts if you haven't opened Facebook for a while. This makes it appear more social and organic than you last remember, and for good reasons: if you come back, Facebook hopes they can develop your habit over time; also, it makes curious people like you less worried about this addicting app. But then, once they know you're finally coming back regularly, they can turn up the dopamine level gradually, and make social posts harder to find. You'll doomscroll to find them, and they know it.
Every dealer probably knows better than to let people overdose on their first sniff. Especially if they're relapsing.
This is quite an interesting post. I would guess that facebook does actually show you friend content if that's what you engage with. After all their single metric of success is ads viewed on the platform, which is the same as time spent.
So theoretically, everyone here complaining about not seeing friend content should probably try and train the algorithm to show more of it.
Or to be an asshole about it - if you see generic clickbait content on facebook, its your fault. You engage with it...
The problem with algorithms is they tend to be kept secret...
For example if I were trying to get a person hooked to the application I'd ensure they have a good experience. If there is someone like the parent poster that only opens the app at an infrequent basis it's probably not a good idea to scare them away.
But your FB junkie. It doesn't matter if they only click on their friends feed or not, show them ad after ad after ad because they are coming back anyway.
No evidence here on my part, since FB wouldn't really confess either way, but if I were manipulating people that would be one of the screwdrivers in the toolbox.
Which is a horrible way to do it
Ok, let's say you're my friend on Facebook. I care about you (I haven't explicitly unfollowed you) enough that I want you in my feed
Do I now click Like on every post you make? Is that how I get the "privilege" of seeing more of you?
Some people may dislike Likes because it leads to narcissism, and ok, fine, whatever. But nobody knows what it does and how it influences what you see (Liking certain pages has in the past auto subscribed you to them) and I consider that to be broken behavior
Social media has become tribal media, where people form strong tribal structures and stay within those. IMHO that has caused the great division we are seeing in many places. Maybe "cult-media" is a better term even.
Instead of coming together we ignore (or berate) each other, which in turn gives rise to the many extremist and authoritarian movements we are witnessing these days.
Kind of on that subject: https://directing.attention.to/p/why-is-no-one-making-a-new-...
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...
I think it just took the world a while to realize that social media is a replacement for cable TV and magazines, not a replacement for communication tools. Looking at old high school classmates' lunch and vacation photos was never good content, never good for business or mental health, and higher quality communication works fine with texting + Discord.
He tells it like its bad thing.
Anyway.. I was listening Acquired podcast on Meta yesterday (yes, the whole 6h30min thing) and what we have today is so far away and different than what he was preaching 15-20 years ago and so distanced to original idea of connecting with people you know and you want to be connected with. Don't even want to talk about ads..
Not once in the article does Mark say social media is over.
And to think that he thinks that is even more folly.
The irony is that Meta's defense in an antitrust trial is basically "we're not dominant anymore because everything is a chaotic content soup now." And… they're not entirely wrong? But also, who made it that way?
A lot of people here are arguing there's no use for Facebook anymore, save maybe for Marketplace.
But there's another big reason to use it, and it's how I use it primarily: special interest groups, such as hobbies, communities around games, etc. They used to be hosted in forums and bulletin boards in the olden times, but there was a big migration to Facebook (even though Facebook was objectively worse for keeping track of conversations) and that was that. If you wanted to keep in touch with those communities, you had to be on Facebook.
Now there's another migration going on for hobby/game groups, one I won't follow this time: Discord. Discord stresses me out, real-time chat is all about being constantly connected and FOMO. And, to me, the UX sucks even more than Facebook's, which is saying a lot! Not for me.
I really never understood discord. The last thing on earth that would be healthy for me is yet another real-time chat program. Yet maybe I’m missing out avoiding it.
It could also mean that their recommendation algorithms are highly effective and managing to get people to spend more time on social media. And if "friends" aren't publishing enough, then foreign content will fill that void. Probably other content the user is interested in.
> “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years
Which does not mean that the time overall has declined. This could even mean that the time itself spent viewing content posted by "friends" did in fact increase, if the percent of time spent on social media increased enough.
Everyone relax - this moron Zuck still has Whastapp left to shittify and it's already begun with businesses spamming people en mass
Old firms that did sms spam as a service now all do whatsapp spam as a service - just one example of the process already inevitably started
I can't wait until people are communicating entirely via algorithms/OS clients with donations running server temp storage.
Then this 21st centure nicotine dealership that has created riches by extracting untold value from people's lives will finally be in history's dustbin where it belongs.
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.