Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over
(newyorker.com)530 points by FinnLobsien 5 days ago
530 points by FinnLobsien 5 days ago
And to think that he thinks that is even more folly.
A lot of people here are arguing there's no use for Facebook anymore, save maybe for Marketplace.
But there's another big reason to use it, and it's how I use it primarily: special interest groups, such as hobbies, communities around games, etc. They used to be hosted in forums and bulletin boards in the olden times, but there was a big migration to Facebook (even though Facebook was objectively worse for keeping track of conversations) and that was that. If you wanted to keep in touch with those communities, you had to be on Facebook.
Now there's another migration going on for hobby/game groups, one I won't follow this time: Discord. Discord stresses me out, real-time chat is all about being constantly connected and FOMO. And, to me, the UX sucks even more than Facebook's, which is saying a lot! Not for me.
I really never understood discord. The last thing on earth that would be healthy for me is yet another real-time chat program. Yet maybe I’m missing out avoiding it.
The irony is that Meta's defense in an antitrust trial is basically "we're not dominant anymore because everything is a chaotic content soup now." And… they're not entirely wrong? But also, who made it that way?
It could also mean that their recommendation algorithms are highly effective and managing to get people to spend more time on social media. And if "friends" aren't publishing enough, then foreign content will fill that void. Probably other content the user is interested in.
> “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years
Which does not mean that the time overall has declined. This could even mean that the time itself spent viewing content posted by "friends" did in fact increase, if the percent of time spent on social media increased enough.
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.
I've just loaded my Facebook home page. 6 'pages' (I know it's infinite scroll but you know what I mean) before I saw an actual friend's post, and it was from 2 weeks ago.
Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore?
E: haha, the rest of the comments say likewise. Redundant comment but +1 anecdata.
Also for what it's worth I've checked a few profiles and yeah friends are still posting, I'm just not seeing it. I guess I scrolled past some post about something too quickly and now Facebook thinks I don't care? Maybe the algorithm is just broken lol.
I was a very early Instagram user and would even defend it over the years as "influencers" became a thing. “I don’t see it as a problem… if you don’t like those people then don’t follow them.”
Nothing about my tastes have changed over the years, but I now find Instagram to be painful to look at. If social media is over, it’s because Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
I would argue that social media’s positive-feedback engine contributed to its own demise. Anec-data:
After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.
This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.
It's MBAs on the eternal quest to juice profits. If a social site ran itself lean like Craigslist they could win the entire prize without the need to manipulate content for the benefit of advertisers.
That's an eloquently stated view. I'm not on FB or Instagram, but everything you said somehow resonated with me as a YT user.
Sure, but don't mislabel that "positive-feedback engine". Engagement, attention loop, reinforcement, clicks, views, comments, likes, follows, longer average visit time, distraction engine, compulsive behavior, higher advertiser revenue, whatever, but it isn't positive and it isn't really feedback.
If you had a friend who in the middle of interactions habitually pulled out a bag of cocaine and snorted some (or gambled), you wouldn't say they were giving positive feedback to the dealer (/casino). You'd say they were annoying and unable to function.
What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
> Meta made the conscious decision to kill it.
No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.
It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).
When a fb exec gave a talk at our then small startup about their 'north star' being monthly active users, I thought maybe they had just given up on serving their customers, that was in 2014. He detailed how they measured 'active' etc.
Our CEO immediately adopted a north star of 'revenue', again just shoving end-users into a pile for exploitation. Companies are not making products to solve an end-user issue, or even add value. The VC is the customer, and if your fb feed and IG is toxic, it's because that's working well for the investors.
I use SM very seldom. But IG was my fav for a long time. I only had about 50 friends, all real people that I knew, they didn't post daily, it was roughly 1:1 ratio of follower:following, so - I could open it up about once a month, scroll through a dozen or so images and see the "you're all caught up" notice and bounce. At some point, I remember it saying my account wasn't showing me Ads because I had low follower count / low engagement - which I thought was great and it went on that way for a few years. Then at some point it became clear it changed. At first, it wasn't Ads, just posts from random people inserted into my feed. I never engage with anything overtly - no likes, comments, etc. But, I think I do spend more time on things that I "like" and do swipe through if there are multiple images if I find something interesting. So that was all the training that it needed. Soon after that, all I see on IG are half naked women in form fitting attire and construction content. Turns out I'm a hetero male that has a hobby of building stuff/home improvement, but I already knew that. I stopped using it all together.
The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.
I feel it's all a side effect of chasing numbers. They show us a bunch of junk, which is addictive for a while but eventually we quit it for good. If they had decided "ok, Facebook is just going to be the place for friend updates" many of us would have stayed.
Meta made the decision to take control of what users see via the feed, and to show them mostly content which is NOT from friends. Content that "performs well".
The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.
I'm no Meta apologist, but I don't know if we can blame them on this one. Unfortunately in the digital age, everything reverts to the mean so quickly. It probably turns out that the most effective way to capture user attention is to give them an algo feed of addictive slop.
Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their products converged on algo feeds.
Facebook is now a birthday-reminder and old-connection-keeper tool loaded with empty content to feel less sad. Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption. Messaging and group chats are the only real social media now
Facebook groups are like the new Internet forums. There’s tons of stuff that’s moved to Facebook groups like Fishing and Car forums. For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.
Marketplace seems to be the new Craigslist and much better IMHO.
Posting is probably dead or dying. I haven’t done it in a decade or so.
They could be huge in this, but sadly they'll continue to ruin it because (IMHO) they are rotten at the core. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a question posted on a relevant topic, switched tabs to consult the manual to verify my memory, and then gone back only to see Facebook do its ADHD reload and bury the question.
Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.
>For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums
Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.
In my experience the Facebook groups always turn to crap, especially if it's a group that attracts more than about 500 users. Abusive posts, scam posts, fake groups with the same name created by bots. I've reverted to old school forums for all my special interests. Marketplace is still the best classifieds product though.
> For a lot of content Facebook groups are much better than forums.
How so? I find FB groups strictly worse than old-school forums.
I don't even enjoy FB Groups any more because of the way they filter comments to “most relevant” so I have to click twice to change it to “all comments” on every single post, over and over and over. Tiresome.
It's embarrassingly dumb sometimes, too, like a post can show “3 comments”, I click it, and the “most relevant” will just be two of them with a bunch of empty space left over in the UI. Just show me all of the fucking comments omfg!!!
Only reason I caved and joined Facebook a few years ago was to get access to a group dedicated to Boston Whaler boats. There were two previously-thriving forums that were slowly dying. The forums were great. The Facebook group was not better, just alive.
That's interesting. In what sense would you say FB groups are much better than forums?
But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only things keeping FB alive.
would rather use reddit for foruming than facebook groups
I would rather have ol' good forums. I would rather have years long posts in the frontpage and the ability to bump a long burried post when new info is up, and not missing the opportunity to engage with a topic just because 1-2 days passed without me logging in and thus the post, being more than 1-2 days old, is not in the frontpage anymore.
Ooh speaking of birthday reminders - if Facebook is browsing this thread looking for things to fix: bring back the birthday iCal feed!
You literally had notifications via my calendar bringing me back to your site every few days/weeks to say happy birthday and maybe have a bit of a browse. Now the reminders are in my todo list and I say happy birthday via text or call instead. Path of least pain in the backside.
Absolutely bizarre they ditched the birthdays and events iCal feeds.
Funny that you think they’d prioritize something that’d be useful, good for you.
iCal feeds don't bring you into the site. The whole point of Facebook is to be a walled garden that discourages you from going elsewhere. You're lucky they are not like X and deprioritize external links. Or maybe they do, I have not tested it myself.
Sounds like you use iOS? Add the birthday to the friend’s contact and it’ll appear in your calendar automatically. You’re welcome in advance.
> Facebook is now a birthday-reminder
It isn't even good at that. I'll often see “it was [whoever]'s birthday yesterday” when I did login on the last couple of days, and it didn't bother to mention the fact then. Too many ads and pointless reals to show me on those days, to have space to insert the now/upcoming birthday reminder, presumably.
"mbasic.facebook.com" was a vastly simpler UI, and had notably less noise content. Sometimes "back" navigation even worked properly. They killed that last year :/
Were it not for distant family using it, I would almost certainly download my content and nuke my account.
I was thrilled to find out that I can block facebook.com in my etc/hosts and still have access to messenger. Hard limiting the time I spend being "social" with robots and hostile outsiders has gone from being a good idea to being a survival strategy as we got further into the industrialization of the attention economy.
Sadly for me, there's another use case for Facebook: special interest groups (as in niche groups for hobbies).
When the Great Migration away from phpbb forums and bulletin boards happened, lots of these groups moved to Facebook. I loathed it, but joining the migration was the only way of keeping up with stuff that interested me.
Now there's another Great Migration to Discord, which I won't follow. Real-time chat simply triggers my FOMO and is stressful to me. So any community that moves primarily to Discord will lose me as a member. I suppose nobody will miss me though.
I guess he meant content produced by "professional" content creators with the only goal of earning money instead of interesting pictures from your friends' life.
At least that's how I experience Instagram these days. It's a chat app where people send each other content made by others in the DMs.
Very few of the people I know personally have posted in the last few years, but most of them seem to casually use the app to explore whatever the algorithm shows them.
Marketplace is the absolute worst UX I could imagine.
Discord are where the kids are at. But with them going public it's going to enshittify quickly and it's only a matter of time before they move onto something new.
I don't know if their newsfeed algorithm is broken, or just grasping at straws, but whenever I log in (fairly often simply for FB marketplace) my feed is full of posts and recommendations for things that don't even make sense for me. For example hiking groups that are in a random mid-size city 2,000mi from me. Or student housing groups in a random international city.
I've tried to even provide feedback on them not being relevant, but they still always appear. I don't know, it really does seem that their newsfeed relevancy is fundamentally broken
The thing that always surprised me about this when I still used FB was that they clearly had the expertise available in Meta to do it right because my Instagram ads/recommended content was almost stunningly well-tailored: events I actually wanted to buy tickets to, products that actually interested me, even down to reels from new comedians I find genuinely funny...
My FB feed, by comparison, was almost exactly like yours - not just irrelevant interests, but geographically crazy irrelevant interests.
I think the main Facebook product is basically running on autopilot now- the folks who wrote the pipelines got promoted and went to work on other stuff.
(note that if you click Friends or Feeds you will see somewhat more personal content, but basically, the main stream is just a list of irrelevant garbage)
My girlfriend also gets the same stuff over and over, most of it AI-generated garbage she's absolutely not interested in. No matter how often she selects "not interested", they always come back. Strangely, this started only recently on her account and mine is still comparatively okay. From what I've heard, it's much worse for US users.
One thing that amazes me is that Facebook thinks I'm interested in content I was interested in more than 25 years ago before Facebook even existed. It's mysterious.
I spent over one year being served sponsored content advertising sales of firearms, cloned credit cards and drugs. Last time I logged in, I’ve noticed that I was being served content based on interests of my close friends. For example, a close friend got really into rock climbing, so I got tons of rock climbing meme accounts.
I have now grown tired of all of that and, when I realised that it had been ages since I had seen someone I actually know post anything, I deactivated it all.
I thought it was being insulting for a while but I guess I did pause on it to screenshot and make a witty post but I'm constantly getting Dull Men's Club, and more recently the knockoff versions haha
Facebook, I'm not into these, and I've told you so! It was just that "Suggested for you: Dull Men's Club" was funny the first time!
Facebook is probably the worst social media company at combating AI bot spam, although it is a tight race with Twitter/X. Even with aggressive pruning of AI generated "content" it's impossible to get ahead. No matter how many bots you block there are 10 more to take their place. I had to abandon the platform.
Facebook doesn't even seem to care that their platform is being strangled with fake posts. At least Twitter/X has the excuse that Elon fired the people who were trying to combat the spam. I don't know what Facebook's excuse is.
Not only that, but people have discovered that comments shown to you on YouTube videos are also subject to "algorithmic scoring", based on your preferences, just like video recommendations.
About a year ago a video went viral where someone in a romantic relationship demonstrated that the opinions expressed in comments on videos shown to her differ radically from the opinions expressed in comments on the exact same video when viewed by her significant other using his account.
My wife and I then immediately verified that this was true for us as well.
The current trend is, relevant-looking top-upvoted comment followed by a thread where an innocent-looking account will ask an innocent question/request for recommendations, and get a helpful reply from multiple concerned kind "people" recommending the same resource... All AI bots from top to bottom
Oh yes I used to have this problem. Then I encountered the wonderful Mary Georgina on the internet and her website helped me lots, and I get such great returns! Have you heard of her?
Even worse, YouTube is presently being over taken with AI slop content.
can we really measure whether they're bad at something they don't actually earnestly try to do?
I used to count how many non-friend items there were between friend posts. If I recall correctly, my max count was 20. And similarly to you, when I do see something it's from 3 days ago and feels no relevant to comment or interact with. I know so many people hate Facebook, but I used to really enjoy those small moments with friends where we could interact over small life updates and photos. Now they feed me garbage to groups I've never subscribed to based on some "guess" around my interests.
I've also done this and my record count was 120. 120 sponsored or suggested posts about things I don't care about in between the posts from people I'm actually interested in.
I'll echo what others have said - if social media is dead, it's because they killed it themselves.
I use the Social Fixer browser extension to hide suggested content and my facebook home page is almost entirely:
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' IT Humor and Memes (UNCENSORED / Sanju L
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / 90's Nostalgia
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Xzo
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Tacofficial
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / The Mother of All Nerds
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Photoshop That / Fatih Trk
Suggested: click to show/hide 'Reels' /
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / JaredHalley
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Quinn Alexander on air
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Sarah SilvermanVerified account
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / History of Music
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Minor League BaseballVerified account
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Posts which will make you come
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / How About that!
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / The Other 98%
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Christians who enjoy good clea / Rachel Ballard
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Graeson Mcgaha
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Ancient history / Jesse Velosa
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Cincinnati Symphony OrchestraVerified ac
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Awesome Science
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Seinfeldism
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Jimlapbap
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / TromboneTimoVerified account
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Handbell People / Deb Grundman
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Action News 5
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Harry Potter Memes / PotterzWorld
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Tom Scott
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / The Student Music Organizer
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / PY6CJ - João Grisi Online
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Memes so literal they aren't even memes
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Pittsburgh Symphony OrchestraVerified ac
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Back To The Future Real Fans!! / Lawrence Neville
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Edson Xhhak
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Raging Mustache
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Tom Papa
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Historic Film Locations / Mark E. Phillips
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / TromboneTimoVerified account
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Thanks Chipper
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Dog Bless You
Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Christians who enjoy good clea / Catherine Lee RodriguezFun game. I just had 7, then 3, then I gave up after 30. And those 2 friend “posts” were 1. someone sharing a page’s post, and 2. a friend posting what appears to be an automated happy birthday on someone else’s wall. I did not see any actual content from friends at all.
Most stuff on FB seems to be 1. pages I don’t follow 2. ads 3. posts from groups I no longer care about 4. random people who are not my friends but somehow I still get to see their posts in my feed (not even popular posts) 5. sometimes, some uninteresting activity by an actual friend (commented on something, shared something) 6. occasionally a friend’s IG story pops up (I guess these are automatically cross-posted to FB or something)
Facebook has devolved to the realm of the unreal now.
I signed-in a few weeks back and the whole thing was just bizarre clickbait, ads, and bizarre clickbait generated image spam.
I really don't see how there's a future for this.
Is this (the abandonment and subsequent mass-sloppification) an American thing?
Is there a user base in other countries? It seems like a relic of a previous era.
I've been on Instagram for less than a year for a photography and now my feed regularly includes what people are now calling "rage bait". which I found are people purposefully posting things to get people to engage with their content and are rewarded when more people comment on that content.
I 100% agree that I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.
> I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.
The first is not a prerequisite for the second. See: fast-food, car-optimized cities, Electron apps, microplastics, AI-controlled drone warfare, trap music, etc.
Yes. I also got fake airplanes and way too long Wikipedia summaries of random things. It seems to me that there are really only a handful of outfits that really have the Facebook algorithm over their knee. It seems like the sort of thing that content moderators should be able to combat, but Facebook has just sort of given up.
> In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media.
That seems accurate to me, and it makes me think of the old-media saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." In other words, anything to get eyeballs/clicks.
Meet the new-media. Same as the old-media.
Enshitification. Investors want their ever increasing return on their investment, even if it means plastering the product with ads
There are limits to this--at some point it reaches a tipping point, and the people leave.
We've broadly seen this on FB with American Millenials (the "core" original FB demographic, there's only so much people can take or so much "value" they get from sinking their time there.
It's shit even with an ad blocker. The problem is that there's just very little organic content anymore, because the fad of posting all the time on social media passed. A social media site can't subsist on birthdays, wedding and babies, but that's all people post about these days. The interesting stuff has moved (back) to topic-based groups or pseudonymous forums (like this one).
Not sure when they will take it away, but for now, there is a cleaner option - go to Feeds on the left (I use it on the computer), and then Friends (as opposed to All or Groups). That gets you the latest posts from friends in reverse chronological order.
Oh wow I actually forgot about this.
I used to have a bookmark that took me directly to the friends feed but it would seem it just redirects to the homepage now, and the navigating to the feeds fresh just loads within the page rather than via URL (at least on mobile web, m.facebook.com, not checked desktop)
Honestly it feels like a hostage situation
Like some engineer in the company begged Mark like, "Please, people are going to drop your product completely unless you give them some control" (remember Top Stories vs Most Recent?)
And Mark's like "yeah, ok, cool" (it'll be removed in 2 years when said engineer quits/is fired)
It's because everyone moved over to using Whatsapp groups instead, for the actual social stuff, and TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for the gratuitous lusting after other people's perfect lives stuff. It used to be that we looked at the perfect shared moments from our friends lives, but this didn't make us feel bad enough so we outsourced it to models backed by teams of experts so that we can compare ourselves to impossible highs and thusly feel only the most exquisite of lows when comparing our own real and therefore often shitty lives.
This is the right answer, and it's something I believe Meta has also said publicly, that messaging apps have become the family and friends connection machine as people shifted to using mobile phones and messaging became free and able to handle multimedia.
Yes this is the key point, and I really don't think Zuckerberg is to blame for this. It's just how the market moved. Before tiktok Zuck did actually try and move facebook back to friend territory, but tiktok became such a threat to time spent online they had to shift to "engaging content"
And everyone is in whatsapp groups anyway for personal content...
When Elon bought twitter he bought back the "following" tab on twitter, and frankly, I used it a few times then stopped. It was just boring. Shifting through pages and pages of random content from people I follow is just too much energy.
The fact is, personalised feeds do just work. We hate this, but it works.
It's a bit like sugar, I know it has zero benefit in 2025 eating sugar, but I just do it, because its nice and it works, and it feels good. My brain knows its bad for me, but I just can't resist.
Now you can blame restaurants and ice cream shops for this, but the fact is, if the particular ice cream shop I buy ice cream at closed, or offered less sugar alternatives, it would in fact lose market share. And of course, there are sugar free ice cream shops, but their market share will never be that big.
If facebook wanted to actually stay on top, they were forced into this.
It’s not universal though - they don’t work for me, I don’t want or care about any of the “value add” in a feed. I don’t want reels, I’m not there for suggestions.
Clearly I’m a minority as I’m sure they have research saying it does drive engagement for large Numbers of people, but Facebook appears to be worse for all that other stuff and as a result is failing everyone.
Long term will show whether it was the right decision by FB. If he now claims social media dead, then maybe already signs are showing, that the decisions were not as smart as he originally thought. Short term thinking kills many businesses.
And that's fine except people have missed seriously important life updates because of selective post non-showing
Facebook already had people up in arms when the feed was first introduced (probably because Zuckerberg seemingly doesn't believe in privacy as a concept, at all) and now they want to ruin it (especially now but it's been like this for years) by defeating the point of it?
And I do blame him, anyway https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122
Facebook and instagram: less and less posts by real people.
Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.
I think the only exception is my local community page on Facebook. People do seem to be civil(real names and close physical proximity help) and it's all real content.
> Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.
I sometimes have the feeling that most HN commenters are also unemployed or in academia and most non-commenting readers are employed.
Fundamental problem with moderation sites like reddit and HN: discussion is controlled by those with the time to moderate. These are also the least likely people you want controlling the discussion.
If only there was a reputation based site where, idk, people with more accomplishments got more weight...
Twitter is, in a way, like that. I can follow, say, John Carmack, and get things he says or has reposted and ignore content from people I don't care about. I think that's why I still find myself there. It's a high signal-to-noise site where I can still participate(and actually have discussions with high achievers and ignore basement dwellers. Vs say reddit where I'm constantly dragged down into debates with the basement dwellers).
> If only there was a reputation based site where, idk, people with more accomplishments got more weight...
Very good point. I personally find Reddit or HN fairer since it doesn’t depend so much on reputation (actually: popularity). But you are right there is a benefit to weighing certain people more. I sometimes wonder whether people like Dijkstra or Feynman would have bubbled up on Twitter too. I guess so. Both were pretty outspoken so the algorithm would pick up on that like people would pick up on Feyman lectures or Dijkstra letters. They had some virality about them.
The moment they started broadcasting any comment I made on any news story to everybody in my network was when it stopped being useful for me. It's one thing for it to be discoverable if people looked, it's another thing to feature every thought I have prominently in the feed of every person I'm connected to. This was probably a decade ago, and I haven't used it much since then.
There are people who live for every ounce of attention, us introverted tech folk probably aren’t the majority of users.
Likewise, Facebook has become spectacularly useless for me. I've missed important moments in friend's lives for several days because Facebook has decided that shoving random fan pages and adverts are what I actually want to see.
A friend's dad died and I didn't know for 5 days. He was busy dealing with everything that comes with such a major life event, posted it to facebook assuming that would be an effective way to communicate it.
I just did a quick tally. Of the first 26 posts in my feed:
* 11 friends/page/groups
* 15 groups/pages that I haven't followed or interacted with.
Of those, the first post was a friend, the next 5 posts were groups or pages I haven't interacted with. It also shoved reels at me 3 times, further delaying me seeing the content I actually want to see.
Of those 11 posts from people I did specifically try to follow on FB, only 2 were from today (not sure if folks just haven't posted).
One of the posts from a friend was from 6 days ago that has never popped up in my feed before. What's notable to me about that delay is that I saw and interacted with a more recent post of theirs this morning. So I guess they've jumped up in priority in "the algorithm", so now it finally decides to show me it.
Of course, continuing in the grand tradition of "Facebook WTF", I went to scroll back up the feed to look for other signal and it's all gone. It doesn't even reliably show me my wife's feeds. (plus it does have that amazing feature where it'll give me a notification that she just posted/commented on something on facebook, and even lies about the time/date of posting until you refresh the page, while she's literally fast asleep beside me.)
I pretty much never use their algorithmic feed. I've switched to going in, selecting `feeds` and then `friends`. There's usually at most a half dozen posts per day. I also belong to some groups, but I'll go to them directly when I want to see what's going on there.
Zuck did announce rather recently the Friends feed is more prominent on the app. It’s always been well hidden, but I think they know people are getting sick of the mindless scrolling.
https://www.theverge.com/news/637668/facebook-friends-only-f...
I’ve basically stopped using the site for all the same reasons. I think it is because their engagement by real human users is near zero. In order to keep it freshfor whoever is left, like seniors hoping for an occasional pic of their grandkids, they fill it with the garbage
This is the primary reason that I'm closer than I've ever been to deleting my Facebook account. I stopped using it in any meaningful way over a decade ago. I think I've posted about six times in the past decade. But I did still check at least a few times a week to see what my friends posted. Now I can scroll for 15 minutes and see only a tiny handful of friend posts, with about six ads and garbage meme posts (not shared by friends, just pure noise injected by Facebook) for each real friend post. I think the ratio is probably even worse than that.
The other day something popped up in the Facebook Android app advertising a new feature to "just see your friends' posts" and when I clicked on that, it really did only show me friend posts and a couple actual ads. I can't find it in the app anymore, though. It's what should be the default view. It's the only thing I will ever care about.
I'm willing to accept a reasonable amount of advertisement as a necessary evil to support the service. What I can't understand is why I'm seeing an endless stream of garbage memes from random accounts that I do not follow and couldn't care less about. Stop "suggesting" things to me. I don't want to "Follow" these morons. I never intentionally interact with any of them, yet I'm flooded with them.
There's little chance of me making it to the end of this year without deleting Facebook entirely. It does nothing to keep me connected to friends anymore, because it hides 99% of their posts unless I view their profiles one at a time, and the few things it does put in my feed are lost in the noise.
Facebook has a Friends feed[1] which only shows posts from friends (and ads, but that's a whole other discussion). Even so, like 80% of the posts from my friends are just them re-sharing news articles or random memes; I wish there was a way to block reshares from pages or something like that.
Also, personal pet peeve: Instagram has a way to turn off "suggested posts" in the feed... for 30 days, then the setting gets automatically turned back on. This is such a blatantly user hostile anti-pattern it's almost as bad as if they didn't have the setting at all.
About couple years ago I logged onto Facebook for the first time in nearly a decade to sell something on marketplace. I took a peek at my feed and the set up was:
Post from some guy I barely knew in high school talking about giving all at his job with zero comments or likes followed by Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad endlessly. I just kept scrolling and scrolling and hitting more pages of ads.
I refreshed and got a different single post followed by more ads. I took a short video of the feed to show my friend who worked at Facebook at the time and he said “oh it might do that when it doesn’t know what to show you, if you use it more it will get better”
I asked how it would learn what I liked when it was just showing me ads and he didn’t have a good answer. I guess nobody cares there.
And why would some one continue to use it if all it does is show ads? You have to put some cheese on a rattrap if you want the rat to stick his head in it.
This. My facebook feed is 10% posts from friends, and 90% ads or weird content posts.
I actually find Facebook's feed much better than LinkedIn's for example. Meta seems to be pretty good at showing me posts from groups I often visit and even the "random" stuff is pretty relevant (although mostly a waste of time reels). LinkedIn "random" stuff is always the same stupid content that for some reason has 1000+ likes. Twitter is not much better, the push stupid videos, but at least they have the "following" feed that is much more relevant and I usually don't even bother with the "for you" feed.
> Jeez Zucky, I wonder why social is dying. Is it because there's no bloody social between the ads and random algorithm shite anymore?
Well, there is a 'tab' (at least on mobile) that is eventually marked 'Friends' buried inside 'Feeds'. The irony is lost on Zuck I suppose, as that used to be the front 'page' and KSP of Facebook.
All of my friends and family just have big whatsapp groups instead.
Guess what will be the next target of randomly inserted ads?
Your friend feed is here:
On desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends (not Friends at the top level). On mobile (or at least iOS, which I have) the bottom sidebar, second left button Friends are not perfect for me but cut out 90% of the garbage.
Make FB responsible for the information from automatic feeds. No need to regulate fake news and stuff. Just make them liable for offences like scams and defamation.
FB defence would be that they are like a telecom company and aren't responsible what is said over the phone. But if they are pushing scammer to call you, then they should be co-liable.
For me social is now family, extended family, siblings, school, high school and university friend groups on whatsapp with just people sharing big news wishing birthdays etc. All the info in the groups is in silo from each group. Where you actually behave in the groups like you would in real life ie differently with different groups.
The only ways FB are tolerable to me:
Desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends.
Mobile - Friends button on the bottom menu.
Not perfect, but cuts out 90% of the garbage.
FWIW this is the only way I use Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
(That plus having FBP installed.)
Still feels like my friends never post any more, except for like 1% of them?
I never load the homepage. Feeds>friends in a firefox container with FBPurity is the only way I’ll touch that abomination.
I also find that I have to mute a lot of over sharers. I feel for those people because I know they are like rats pushing the social lever for some imaginary sense of connection.
The FB feed has been completely useless for a few years now. I stopped posting a while ago because it didn't really make sense anymore. Meta sucking up to the MAGA crowd broke the last straw for me and I've finally deactivated my account.
I don't see a lot of friends posts, but I see some groups which are pretty active, and sometimes even useful. For instance, local hiking group, people post pictures, organize hike. I thought facebook was dead, but there's still a lot of activity.
I highly recommend the FB purity extension to remove all that crap: https://www.fbpurity.com/
I just opened Facebook (for the first time in months) and 3 of the top 5 stories are from friends. Not sure why you have such a different experience.
I tried the same a while back. I am now pretty sure it's part of the algorithm. If you stay away long enough, it reels you back in to scrolling by showing you some important updates first and before you know it, it draws you back into the abyss of AI generated content and ads and influencers.
edit: s/tells/reels
Just filter everything out that's not an actual post by a friend. Filter out news, shares, ads, etc - all that nonsense.
you can't. they don't give you a filter to show just friends. you have to slog through all the "recommended" posts
I didn't say to use a filter that they provide. It's your "user agent" - have it do your bidding.
I use FBP: https://www.fbpurity.com/faq.htm
Is there a setting to only show content from friends? Last used FB 13 years ago.
On web site - https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
Can't see that - requires a login. So, there is a setting. Believe you.
Mark owns 3 of the most popular apps in existence. Hard to call him a one hit wonder even if his other hits were just recognizing which companies to buy
> recognizing which companies to buy
I bet it's really simple from the vantage point of being the owner of the biggest social app with billions to spare.
“Recognizing which companies to buy” is your argument? That’s how low the bar is: money = smart. Buying your competitor for crazy high prices while paying even more to avoid antitrust laws is kinda the tech bro playbook.
True. He hasn't actually built anything since the very first days.
I hope so, and things might go back to having nice platforms for niche verticals, im making one of my own, for wildlife photography now that insta hates us :D
> Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.
But Meta controls what people get to see, so this is pretty dubious data, right?
Yea, well. Facebook will eventually disallow you to even search marketplace without a face picture. Punishment for not feeding their databases I guess. It doesn't matter if you have 100 friends. It doesn't matter if you post 1,000 pictures of your farm. That's some dystopian ish right there. People have definitively noticed and many in my circles have refused to engage because of it. Good riddance.
The title of this article is misleading. Nowhere in the article does Zuckerberg say "social media is over" or anything close to it.
So I hate Medicare Advantage (and conversely rather like Traditional Medicare) because private companies have perverse incentives when managing public goods. I think social media is a public good and what we’ve seen is a result of Facebook’s perverse incentives. A friend asked what do we do about the perverse incentives? That’s kind of difficult when Citizens United represents regulatory capture by corporations.
Another way to put this: Tiktok won.
I agree that the days of posting "this is what I had for dinner" are over. Facebook is a cesspool of your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories. IG isn't a friends network anymore. It's for following influencers.
Tiktok has a following tab but anecdotally I don't know anyone who uses it regularly and as a significant portion of time on the app. It's all about the FYP. And Tiktok's algorithm is far superior to any other in this one way: how quickly it updates. You watch a video about ducklings and within 2-3 videos you'll be seeing more videos about ducklings.
Compare this to FB, IG and Youtube: it seems like the process of learning what you like is far less responsive, almost like there's a daily job that processes your activity and updates the recommendation engine to your new interest levels.
Also, Tiktok is very good at localizing your interests. By this I mean, the other platforms will push big creators on you. On Tiktok it's a common occurrence to stumble on a video from someone I've never heard of who has 20M+ followers and this is the first video I've seen in 2+ years from them. On FB or IG, if someone has a massive following, you'll almost have to block them to avoid seeing them if it's something you have zero interest in.
These companies like the whole friends connection because it's a network effect, keeping users on the platform. Without that, it's so incredibly easy to switch when the new thing comes along.
I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat.
I think you're right (though YT is crazy good and finding what you like imo).
> I would say that the rise of group chats instead is evidence of how social media is failing users. People do want to communicate with a closed group. It's like they say: any organization app has to compete with emailing yourself. Any social media has to compete with a group chat.
This is true, but the truth is that you spend maybe 1 hour (if that) in group chats, while many people spend 4-5 hours a day on Tiktok/IGReels. So the revealed preference is that yes, they want to be connected to their friends via group chats, but they want mindless entertainment a lot more.
The relevant fact here is contained in this article's subheadline, which starts with: "During testimony at Meta’s antitrust trial..."
He's saying "social media is over" because if it is then his company, which dominates social media, does not have market power and thus is not a monopolist.
The statement should be evaluated for what it actually is, the statement of an accused lawbreaker during a prosecution by the government.
I actually think he's correct and the gov's case doesn't really correspond to reality.
It's actually true that social media as it was in the 2010s (when the Instagram and WA acq's happened) is basically over.
They're no longer social, they're mostly just media: apps designed to be portals into consuming as much content as possible, by whomever (so you watch more ads).
I'm not saying Meta is a great company or Zuck is a great person, but the idea that Instagram & Facebook compete with TikTok and YouTube is 100% true.
> gov's case doesn't really correspond to reality
It does because if Facebook didn't monopolize the social media space maybe we would see innovation instead of blatant feature copying. Instead we have 3(4 if you consider Threads as one) platforms owned by the same company that push the same content - posts, reels, stories and actively try to unify and cannibalize each other. Breaking them down to individual companies will absolutely improve the market.
But how will it improve the market? By making a less addictive (read: less engaging) app that does social media "the old fashioned way" where you connect with friends an not much else?
I love that intention, but it wouldn't be competitively viable. That's why yes, social media in that form is over. The reason Instagram and Facebook are valuable is because billions of people have accounts there and are habituated to go there in every spare second and look at whatever the screen serves them, whether that's Johnny from 7th grade math getting married or a snake being friends with a cat in rural Egypt.
Ack, I'm getting the sense that the author of this article is getting caught up in the argumentation prepared for use in the trial. Of course the Meta people are going to do everything they can to get everyone feeling it's like this to shake at the logical foundations of the case.
The F.T.C. is not chasing an old problem. A case like this may serve as precedent.
This is kind of bad, because it makes it very hard to reach people for social events. I run a fan group for a European soccer team and it's very hard to do outreach because no one is really checking social media for that type of thing. Even meet-ups in general are difficult. There is of course meetup.com but it's niche and expensive.
I recall having Facebook and always had that feeling the algorithm was messing with me and my posts… Come to find out a few years later it was exposed that Facebook was conducting mass social experiments to users and their comments and posts. Shadow banning and I just never liked the feed…it was not organic.
It’s been over for years. At least Facebook has for me. I got rid of it several several years ago - didn’t delete it, just never logged in again and deleted Facebook from my phone.
Never looked back. One of the few online actions I can honestly say made my life better.
Social media predates the term social media by decades. It isn't dead and won't ever die because humans love to socialize and we will continue to use tech to facilitate that.
Commercial social media on the other hand may well be dying.
$ URL="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zucke..."
$ lynx -dump $URL | less
Teens Migrating From Facebook To Comments Section Of Slow-Motion Deer Video. March 20, 2014
>Meta’s counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se doesn’t exist now in the way that it did in the twenty-tens, and that what the company’s platforms are now known for—the digital consumption of all kinds of content—has become so widespread that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it.
Sure, and as long as people are making things Ford can't monopolize the auto industry. As long as people talk to each other Bell can't monopolize telephones.
This thing where people just generalize the conversation into meaninglessness is so frustrating. Everyone knows what social media is and does until it's time to do something about it then all of a sudden like a Roman salute no one actually has any idea what this is and really telephones are also social media but also social media doesn't exist anymore at all and also some social media is an existential threat to democracy and human rights but not the one that I own which, again, doesn't exist but still somehow makes me enough money that I can put the president on layaway.
I generally trend away from authoritarianism but I can see the appeal in just saying "Jesus Christ shut up we all know what's actually going on here" and just doing something
What I wonder is did everyone stop posting because there was too much content spam or did they fill the newsfeed with content because everyone stopped posting?
//What, exactly, does a social network do?//
<i>It's as if no one had ever thought of any of it before</i>
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_industry
Go on...
//Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you.//
There you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. And from such an auspicious start, an empire was born.
I checked Facebook the other day. Every post is a vertical video. I'm on desktop. If I wanted to see vertical videos, I'd go to TikTok.
How much is the algorithm swayed by the behaviour of stealth bots trying to act human in order to gain the cred to be a more effective bot?
Maybe should have not done 2016 Facebook elections?
Ads all the way, almost no posts from my network, and bunch of unmoderated, Onlyfans promoting reels. Thanks.
Kind of hilarious to juxtapose with recent news of OpenAI (contemplating) starting its own social network to mine training data
As someone said, given a long time and every webpage becomes a porn fetish page
I'm surprised about the amount of comments here berating FB & social media companies. You have the option to deactivate your account and stop using it, to "vote with your feet". Meta is a company and will maximise revenue & engagement - what's actually more worrying is that people still use these sites and doom scroll their nights away (generally speaking of course).
The writing was on the wall a decade ago when everyone and their cat was posting junk content. Zuck's original idea was outstanding. He slowly cannibalized the massive success into outright gross platform:
Get to know girls at Harvard!
---
Get to know girls at select universities!
---
Get to know anyone we've invited! We're so popular, we've got profiles of people at every major university! Write them messages, organize parties, etc! Upload pictures of parties or anything interesting!
---
And now you can play addicting games on Facebook!
---
And you can make a profile if you don't have a school!
And be fed ads and clickbait!
---
while we quietly dump-sell all your info to anyone!
---
Now meet 20% more criminals and scammers! Sell your car on our marketplace! You'll regret every message!
---
Now with international crime!
---
Now with more bots than humans!
---
Why is everyone not respecting us? Oh, its over!
META creates $70 billion per year in NET profit. Mark Zuckerberg is the best business person in the history of business. He's an angel to investors and advertisers. Vanguard has 43 million shares of TSLA. They lost $10 billion in stock depreciation since peak in December 2024. Vanguard has 191 million shares of META valued at $101 billion. No one is losing money on META.
Conflating luck and timing to skill and intent is a hell of a way to lionize someone. One man's wealth is not a measure of skill, it's a measure of greed.
Both META and TSLA are magic stocks, completely unaffected by reality.
Zuckerberg says social media is over... so why isn't his stock tanking? Meta is a social media company!
Tesla reports huge dips in sales, nothing... sure it's down since December, but it's still up year to year.
this is a baffling and terrifying worldview/basis of principle.
By "over" he means it isn't going to make him billions of more dollars.
this is a somewhat unique new yorker style habit https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
Umlaut is a separate concept from diaeresis but shares the symbol
I think I know why TikTok made it to the top of social media. They did not coerce weird corporate rules and let the users have what they wanted. Simple as that. Grown organically. That does not mean it isn't bad for the users in the long run but at least they get what they want.
actually its alive and well on bluesky...my profile:
https://bsky.app/profile/fredgrott.bsky.social
join me on on bluesky
Social media has now reached a state of equilibrium with normal society.
Is it a diversionary ploy, perhaps the DOJ is looking at breaking up megacorps or something? I think you have to subscribe to read the full story either that or it was really short. Either way, I didn't see a mention of the DOJ on the page.
We're just scrolling random content now and not using "social media". Basically like watching tailored made, but really really shit quality TV. Instagram is massive for this.
Interpersonal social media is dead thanks to Zuck and his companies, sacrificed on the altar of endless growth. His objective now is to profit from keeping people addicted to slop.
I wonder if he ever had a moment of self-reflection to understand how far he veered off the path he'd started on. If he ever considered himself a hacker, then I doubt that all he wanted to build was slop machines.
Hey, it's my day to be the Mastodon Guy! But for real, small, federated social media is so freaking pleasant compared to Facebook and friends. No, the kid from my 8th grade soccer team isn't on it, nor is my next door neighbor, or my kid's nanny from 3 moves ago, but that's fine. Sure, I wish more of the authors I like to follow were on there, and it's not a great way to call out megacorp support teams when something breaks horribly, but I'm completely OK with that tradeoff.
What I get instead is a collection of small, resilient servers where the feed algorithm is FIFO, there's no advertising, and moderation is local.[0] It's my favorite parts of the old Internet before things got centralized and enshittificated.
I hope megasocial media is over. I doubt it, but a guy can wish. That doesn't mean all social media is dead.
[0]Mastodon doesn't have moderation. Individual servers do. That's the way it should be.
I have seen some journalists and orgs move to Mastodon but the culture being what it is, people will be hostile to anything that looks like an attempt by corporate entities or propaganda outlets to capture and commoditize the platform.
And honestly, I'm fine with it. Corporate media is a cesspool. It can all choke on its own fetid stench and die for all I care.
right, but save for.. threads federation... there's been trepidation in my more normal friends to use anything other than the shibboleth. I'd rather an incompetent like Nast manage the platform than a company like Facebook that knows all too well how to leverage their scale. Anyways they're one of the better ones.. from what I've been told.
I think this will be the case, part of the charm of early social media was everyone was authentically oversharing. That got people in trouble or they embarrassed themselves. That's why snapchat with automatically deleted posts got a foothold, there wasn't a permanent record of your embarrassing fuck ups.
That will not happen again, we won't be so collectively naive and any new social media will be taken over by PR + brand advertisers almost immediately. Just look at how threads started.
Zuckerberg is one of the architects responsible for its demise, so he'd be well-placed to declare its death. Early facebook really was an amazing product; all you saw was content from your friends, no one shared links, it was just a way to communicate with each other. Importantly, very few people were on facebook, which helped people be much, much more candid on the platform. Zuckerberg killed both of these features -- pushing garbage and ads, pushing the feed, and populating facebook as thoroughly as possible. I looked at my early feed (~2008?) years ago, and it was actually just friends catching up and girls flirting with me. I wasn't even that popular. To them, it was just another chat venue. They'd never consider the same these days. The platform is a cesspool.
Obligatory Eric Andre meme of "Who killed social media?"
I think a lot of folks are correctly pointing out that new social media is probably much closer to something like Discord, where individuals can define their own communities and make sure they're only getting the content from their family in that community.
It means they're much more responsible for policing their own content and don't have to worry about agreeing with the central policing platform. Seems like a much healthier direction for Social Networks... At least... healthier than whatever is happening at Facebook.
How can social media be dying when people like Elon Musk have like, 6,000 profiles?
/sarcasm
Seriously though, if Facebook put in even a modicum of effort to block the traffic from like, a dozen cities or usernames the platform could regain some semblance of what it used to be.
Failing that, they could provide users with bulk blocking based on geolocation or regex username match and let users take some control over what they get spammed with. The tools provided are completely inadequate.
I read this yesterday about Zuck. God, Zuck, what a cunt. It's a review of Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, which Meta tried to kill.
It also mentions Zuck's motivation for learning Mandarin.
Yes it's off-topic, but I think it's important to know when discussing Zuck/Meta:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf
> There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet).
> At one point, Wynn-Williams gets Zuck a chance to address the UN General Assembly. As is his wont, Zuck refuses to be briefed before he takes the dais (he's repeatedly described as unwilling to consider any briefing note longer than a single text message). When he gets to the mic, he spontaneously promises that Facebook will provide internet access to refugees all over the world.
[...]
> Meanwhile, Zuck is relentlessly pursuing Facebook's largest conceivable growth market: China. The only problem: China doesn't want Facebook. Zuck repeatedly tries to engineer meetings with Xi Jinping so he can plead his case in person. Xi is monumentally hostile to this idea. Zuck learns Mandarin. He studies Xi's book, conspicuously displays a copy of it on his desk. Eventually, he manages to sit next to Xi at a dinner where he begs Xi to name his next child. Xi turns him down.
> After years of persistent nagging, lobbying, and groveling, Facebook's China execs start to make progress with a state apparatchik who dangles the possibility of Facebook entering China. Facebook promises this factotum the world – all the surveillance and censorship the Chinese state wants and more.
[...]
> According to Wynn-Williams, Facebook actually built an extensive censorship and surveillance system for the Chinese state – spies, cops and military – to use against Chinese Facebook users, and FB users globally. They promise to set up caches of global FB content in China that the Chinese state can use to monitor all Facebook activity, everywhere, with the implication that they'll be able to spy on private communications, and censor content for non-Chinese users.
[...]
> Despite all of this, Facebook is never given access to China. However, the Chinese state is able to use the tools Facebook built for it to attack independence movements, the free press and dissident uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Mark sounds like he negotiates as well as his "Art of the Deal" buddy Donald.
i feel the same way about former Raytheon/Lockhead/Palantir types as well.
Comments for this article - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43780363
I suppose for a few billion dollars (or even a smaller sum), I'd let a lot of things happen to me.
Well OK, the difference would be, would it be just affecting me, or my daughter (already quite gross), or affecting the lives and freedom of millions of exiled Uyghurs, Tibetans and other dissidents around the world by creating a spying apparatus against them.
There's also the difference that the few billion dollars being a sum of money I don't already have, compared to Zuck already having dozens, and wanting another few...
thanks mark, you ruined myspace and orphaned us from fun
Every time I open my FB I get hammered with dozens of random ads. Also, a randomly generated lists of posts from my network where things pop up, and are then completely lost in the aether, because that is how FB thinks it is going to increase engagement.
Facebook, and Instagram, is a frustrating, infuriating, alarming experience that really does not "bring joy" to my life.
At this point he's just saying what he thinks is expedient in order to avoid the government breaking up his companies.
It's why the whole Meta thing exists - they wanted to be seen as a VR company who has a side hustle in social media to avoid being classified as a monopoly. That argument has failed so now he's asserting that social media doesn't matter.
Sure Zuckerberg et al turned social media into unsocial/psychopathic media.
However isn't this simply a blatent attempt to pretend the monopoly he is accused of having doesn't exist by using semantics?
yeah - he killed it
when was the last time you were social on Facebook?
and maybe threads would count if it weren't 95% filled with bots and mentally ill weirdos pretending to know quantum physics (and how dare you judge them for doing so; whether or not they know quantum mechanics is like totally subjective and your frequency is clearly too low).
so either social is not dead or he killed it
Says the person running a social network website where I see one of my friend's posts amid eight "suggestions" that bear no interest to me.
I have kept my FB account open just to contact some members of the family that live far away. Or to check someone I know in my circle that I haven't heard from a while.
But scrolling? Nah. I don't have the app and only open it once a month.
There's a word for it: enshitification. Blame yourself for making it a crap experience, Mark.
"We brought you into this world, and we can take you out!"
ofc they aren't, they show ads and they are focused on damaging the mental health of their users.
Facebook is all slop nowadays. X is amazing thoughj.
Many many reasons. There are incredibly smart people on X who are writing and sharing their thoughts on things. There's nothing comparable to that on the internet.
It may be ok for you if you live in an area with highly concentrated talent but for me I'm pretty isolated so it makes a tremendous difference.
The fact that the old system would ban people for completely absurd reasons (including covid "misinformation" that all turned out to be true, but not exclusively that) and one thing Musk did do is put a stop to some of that
I'm fully willing to listen to all the arguments that he's actually a horrible person but I don't see how people feel that part of it wasn't necessary to fix
Virtue signaling political incorrectness is the only reason I can imagine people promoting Twitter right now.
Also on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/dril.bsky.social
just buy the book, it's enough dril for a lifetime
Not once in the article does Mark say social media is over.