Comment by esperent

Comment by esperent 5 days ago

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.

aprilthird2021 5 days ago

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.

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zpeti 5 days ago

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.

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Nursie 5 days ago

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.

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zelphirkalt 5 days ago

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.

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alex1138 5 days ago

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

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- corobo 5 days ago
  
  Missing things is another one I noticed yeah. In my case it's gigs from local places I actually follow.
  Why show an event that happened last Friday? They even know it's time sensitive because it's an event with a date and time attached!
  
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