Comment by ColinWright

> 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.

There's more engagement with consuming content, therefore more ad opportunity and more revenue. But entertainment sources are more fungible than communication platforms. So in turning FB into a media company (effectively) they may have grown faster, but they also made themselves more vulnerable to a disrupter like TikTok.

There is a good reason I don't stock my freezer with microwave pizza.

IG has slowly become a gateway to OF hasn't it?

you could just delete your accounts. i find that my family and friends still seek out connection and interactions with me, as i do them, even without some sort of computational facilitator like instagram.

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.