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 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
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 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.
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.
Haha of course. I was probably just one of a mere few hundred million people using it in a way that brought me back to the algorithm so it got scrapped for underutilisation :(
Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause people to trip over themselves to give us what we want and need because that would naturally be where most of the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is you.
Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented
ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price.
In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else.
Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.
For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know what to call that other than blatant corruption of our government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a bipartisan way.
Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of being the only company in US history to have been tried and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two example measures under discussion in the court at the moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
Foreign competitors is how you get competition usually. The big 3 auto companies can lobby Congress and discourage competition. When American Cars started installing tailfins (purely cosmetics) instead of competing on fuel performance, maintenance or price, they were opening the door for the Japanese auto industry to eventually take over, with the crisis of the oil shock being the instigating factor for people changing their consumption habits
And, any time some company gets close to "give us what we want and need," the company will be bought by Facebook, or funded by VCs, and new ownership will "correct" the problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Fun 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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So Meta basically turned Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content' and now claims that's what users wanted? That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy and then saying 'See? Nobody wants real meals anymore!'
While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation.
But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals.
Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways.
There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.
That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are.
If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).
I know from a strictly economic standpoint the things I do are the things I want. But is doing an activity are you addicted to what you really want in a human sense?
There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting with the people you know. Group chats.
Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.
It is what people wanted though, from Facebook. Most people, including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger (iMessage, etc.)
Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a small niche in the market
I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.
I think it's more like a restaurant offering both candy and burgers.
When candy sales outpace burgers, they're naturally going to invest more in candy. Eventually, they start to compete more with Hershey's than McDonald's.
I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't.
If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time.
If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)
What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried to evolve into something and alienated all their existing customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the pie) so they "evolve" no matter what.
This isn’t quite true. There are many businesses like Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of growth that do fine in the stock market.
Infinite growth!!!
How silly we still are as a species. The more of us there are, the stupider we act, and we don't even do anything to prevent it, we just let the consequences of our own stupidity roll over us one day, when they can no longer be stopped.
> 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’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."
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...
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.
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).
Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.
Eh, I think the parent has a point. You underline it yourself when you say “people they already know”.
The internet didn’t always involve a choice between “talk to people I know” vs “bravely/foolishly taking on the vitriol of a wild horde of angry delusional maniacs”, but now we’ve lost almost all of the space in between those extremes. People like hacker news exactly because it’s the rare place that’s still in the middle *(sometimes, on some topics, for now)
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.
>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.
Sounds like you’d have appreciated 90s era irc, which was good for nuanced and sincere discussion, but also did not require talking to people that you already knew.
There’s a sweet spot between open/closed and known/unknown and somewhat focused but not too niche where it kind of works. Theres a certain size that works too, ideally Lots of users and yet occasionally you recognize someone. But I don’t think that’s what people mean at all by group chat today, which regardless of venue tends to be rather more insular and thus echo’y.
In IRC, and as many do here, you used an alias to have the confidence to speak freely. Products like WhatsApp where people reveal their real identities don't lend themselves to that frankness when membership is open.
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
I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did they become less popular? I think they are just less visible by nature, they've always been pretty common. I guess some people switched to Facebook Groups for a time, but even that is sort of a form of group chat.
They never worked properly on phones, including images/video and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously expensive because the phone companies thought it was still the 1960s.
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.
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?
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
>...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group
For me personally, this is a feature not a bug. I want things I see to be things that somebody wrote just for that channel. It's why I use group chat over 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Write an algorithm to maximize in app time, so he ended up building a content media platform not a social one. If the goal is to show as many ads as possible, you will always end up with more media than social
>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.
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..
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?
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.
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?
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
Seriously, talk about self fulfilling. "We stopped showing people content from their friends, and people started spending less time viewing content from their friends. It's inexplicable, really."
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.
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.
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.
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_?
Those aren’t mutually exclusive options. Facebook wants to always have new things to show people so they stay on the site, but it was absolutely their choice to deprioritize your friends’ posts below advertisers and the “engaging” slop.
Some mid-level manager idiot's a/b test revealed that they could maximize engagement by showing more rage bait and less family. This increased revenue and nobody wants to suggest a change that lowers it.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
It absolutely makes a difference because tv shows are usually 20 mins at least, which means watching 3 minutes in the supermarket line is actually a bad experience, so it requires more deliberation.
I’d also argue that the average TV show is more edifying than the average social media post but that’s another topic.
> 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...
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.
Don’t be surprised if your family gets radicalized with some idea they were against just a generation ago. Facebook and social media is so many bad things at the same time: propaganda, surveilance, consumerism, deception, addiction, and complete isolation from one another. I find social media responsible for a lot of modern ills in our society.
It's all broken because the incentives are all broken. Everything is optimized for maximum profit through maximum screen time and maximum ad impressions.
If anything the online advertisement industry has shown that it cannot be trusted as a means to support businesses while having those businesses provide a healthy, no addictive, worth having product.
Would it truly hurt Facebook, Google or YouTube to make less money. Many companies could provide better solutions, if they where happy with less profit.
>If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.
this is broken, I get stupid posts with same image, about body parts and english words for them, I marked it as not interested at least 3 times,
but it appears again and again from other poster . So FB is incapable to now show me the exact same thing over and over again despite me telling them 3 times I am not interested.
Also I doing some math stuff with my son so now I am getting images with math in them, tracking really works
Flagging them will clean it up for a while, but I find eventually it will show you a few more here and there. If you stop scrolling and ogle for a little bit then it starts feeding you more again.
But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it? ;-)
I get what you're getting too, also wall-of-texts multi-image posts, often content reposted from reddit, I guess the algorithm thinks "Oh, user is engaged for many seconds with all the images on posts like this, gotta serve them more of them!".
I've programmed Tasker to kill Instagram after a minute of me opening it and I've made another Tasker script that asks me to input a 9-digit random number, makes me wait between 5-45 seconds and then allows me 10 minutes of the app before making me do the whole process again.
Women with few clothes (sadly) always grab my attention, yes. But I think that content is also being pushed despite my attention to other things because it works in general.
But you get the point, the recommendations are just a stream of nonsense-content, screenshots of screenshots of Reddit posts...
I don't get it. Either there's no good, original content available out there or the algorithm just doesn't want to show it.
> But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it?
I'm reasonably certain clicking into a piece of content to block the account still counts as more engagement for that type of content. They don't seem to have a "clicked, then immediately blocked" sort of signal.
Whenever using a Meta product I have to be hyper-aware of what i stop scrolling on or click on, because Meta is all about "revealed preference" instead of what I explicitly tell them I follow and like.
IE: Don't let your eyes linger on eyecandy on Meta's platforms or they will feed you a firehose of horny slop.
Very true and I think is part of their business model. A more lonely/isolated user is more likely to buy stuff to soothe themselves thus clicking in the advertisements they show.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the only thing keeping you on Facebook is sources of specific content, you're looking for a platform that also has sources of that specific content. So it depends on what that content is, doesn't it?
You gotta find those small communities. I'm into 4wheel drives and use facebook groups but I'm often on Ih8mud now. Just a better place to be imo. You got to find where your people are at
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.
Is it? Are you sure centralized authorities for "discovery" are a good thing? After all, the "discovery" algorithm is making people move off FB to 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 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’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
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” 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.
The other hits came from breaking laws against anti-competitive behavior by his company, which is the exact subject of the trial this article is based on.
It was a defensive acquisition most likely and the app has pretty much not changed functionally one bit from when he acquired it. He had no vision for it clearly.
I'm getting a bit of reddit vibes in that you only took part of what I said out of context, and ignored the rest.
But also yes it was very much a defensive acquisition, and my point about them not (yet) ruining it shows that there was no plan.
Buying another company from the spoils of your first hit doesn't make you not a one hit wonder. Especially since most of your bidding competitors would have been blocked by antitrust.
I don't know if the same is true for Instagram. I've never used it.
Why bother reinventing it? The only social apps that have ever been needed are basic chat apps (group or private) and tools for meeting up in real life (such as group chats).
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.
You mean make them as they originally were? Sure, but better learn lessons about how FB ended up such a shithole while still massively used, or you will just repeat that lesson (while massively less successful due to initial momentum)
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.
> 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.
I consider all Meta employees culpable for enabling this company and I will blacklist you all when I am reviewing your resumes. You are wealthy and educated enough to know better but you chose to make money at the expense of the world around you.
Someone who is willing to sell their life, including naming their literal child, and all of their morals that might exist, for cash, is gross. Zuck is gross and should be embarrassed.
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...
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.
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.
Not necessarily. Breaking the companies up will foster innovation via competition. Who knows what will come out of it? Will it be better than Facebook burning stacks of cash on Zuck's latest fancy(XR/AI/?)? How long will the market be confident in his dollar pyromania? I will short that company like there's no tomorrow if I was in any position to do so.
This is more my opinion than time and market-backed statement but I don't believe addictive design is good for the long-term market positions of those companies because they may be addictive now but a lot of people loathe them* and are looking to escape from their design. They will jump on whatever comes next and not look back. What's good for the company long-term is to provide value to the user - local groups, FB marketplace, etc and become embedded in the culture and society.
* needs citation but it looks like the article supports this view
Sure, I also hate what all of this is doing to society and people more generally! But it's also fair to say he is actually correct in saying that social media as we know it is over and it's now about generic content consumption.
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.
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 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
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.
https://archive.is/UnNjh
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.
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 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 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
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
Boss: "you're only allowed to work on things that serve more ad views"
Haha of course. I was probably just one of a mere few hundred million people using it in a way that brought me back to the algorithm so it got scrapped for underutilisation :(
Remember when they told us that capitalism would cause people to trip over themselves to give us what we want and need because that would naturally be where most of the profit could be had? Why do you think it didn't do that in this case? The answer of course is that facebook does serve it's customers. It serves the people who can afford to buy ads, and what it serves them is you.
The missing ingredient is usually "competition"
Same thing with the "private sector is always better" religion - if there's no meaningful competition, you end up no choice coupled with a profit motive, vs. no choice but I can at least nominally vote and be represented
ISPs are usually a good example in the US. My old apartment had one provider, and wouldn't you know it, at my new apartment with multiple providers, I got five times the bandwidth for half the price.
See also: enshittification
In light of competition being the missing ingredient, the question becomes how does one maintain ongoing competition in a system where the bigger of two competitors tends to win and the winner of two competitors tends to get bigger? That's exactly what happened here: Facebook was bigger than WhatsApp, and FB+WA is bigger than Insta, so FB+WA+Insta is a lot bigger than anyone else.
Back in the day when Microsoft was the one in the DoJ's sights someone compared it to a dog race. Dogs don't have jockeys, so you have to figure out some other way to induce them to run. The way most tracks (probably all, idk much about dog racing but it's a useful metaphor here) do that is by having a mechanical bunny that runs out ahead of the dogs and activates their prey drive. The bunny has to be ahead of the dogs, but not so far ahead that they don't think they can catch it and give up. That means that every once in a while a dog will get the timing just right, go extra hard, and actually catch the bunny. At that point, the race is over for everyone until someone steps in to shake the dog loose from the bunny and give everyone a reason to run again. Our system is like that: we have to encourage everyone to do everything they can to catch the bunny but also ensure that they never actually do. Bill Gates was the first person in my memory to catch the bunny, and needed to be shaken loose. Now it's Zuckerberg, and probably Google, that need to be pried off of their respective bunnies so that everyone else has something to chase.
For a start, and it might even be enough, you strictly enforce anti-trust laws which are already on the books that prevent sufficiently large firms from acquiring their competitors and doing exclusivity deals. These laws have largely been ignored for decades and I don't know what to call that other than blatant corruption of our government, but it's slowly starting to change, in a bipartisan way.
Microsoft escaped the worst of what the government wanted to do to them for their anti-trust violations. It may not go so well for Google as they hold the distinction of being the only company in US history to have been tried and found guilty in three separate cases of possessing three illegal monopolies all at the same time. Two example measures under discussion in the court at the moment are forbidding any renewal of their browser default deal with Apple, and forcing them to sell off Chrome. We will see soon enough what comes next.
Foreign competitors is how you get competition usually. The big 3 auto companies can lobby Congress and discourage competition. When American Cars started installing tailfins (purely cosmetics) instead of competing on fuel performance, maintenance or price, they were opening the door for the Japanese auto industry to eventually take over, with the crisis of the oil shock being the instigating factor for people changing their consumption habits
And, any time some company gets close to "give us what we want and need," the company will be bought by Facebook, or funded by VCs, and new ownership will "correct" the problem.
> 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.
Actually it's biggest value is marketplace though the scammers know that too.
Marketplace is the absolute worst UX I could imagine.
highly overpaid Facebook engineers must be forced to use Marketplace to try to buy their cars, instead of buying from a dealer.
maybe that way they would improve things a bit
> Instagram and TikTok are also trending towards content consumption
Huh? They were explicitly built for that purpose, not "trending towards". Without content consumption, those platforms are nothing.
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.
(now as in 10 years ago)
Anybody worth keeping in contact with, I have their phone number.
The only use for Facebook is for the marketplace.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Fun 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)
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...
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.
This. My facebook feed is 10% posts from friends, and 90% ads or weird content posts.
Your friend feed is here:
https://www.facebook.com/?filter=all&sk=h_chr
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.
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
I highly recommend the FB purity extension to remove all that crap: https://www.fbpurity.com/
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr
It’s odd that in the iPad version, the friends button at the bottom doesn’t take you to the same feed, but rather lists of people to add.
There used to be a hidden "only friends" feed - it got removed, or is hidden even better. Also you couldnt default to it.
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.
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.
[dead]
So Meta basically turned Facebook from 'connecting with friends' into 'doom-scrolling random content' and now claims that's what users wanted? That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy and then saying 'See? Nobody wants real meals anymore!'
Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".
Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.
While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation.
But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals.
Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways.
There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.
That is true but you have to be very specific about who your "users" are.
If your "users" are the guys in charge of showing more ads to people, then yes. People, on the other hand absolutely prefer watching their contacts' posts first. Recommendations related with their individual preferences, second. Random dopamine-inducing stuff, only from time to time. If you prioritize the third kind only is like someone said already on the commments here: like a restaurant that only serves candy. They will have customers for a while but eventually they will burn them down (or kill them).
I know from a strictly economic standpoint the things I do are the things I want. But is doing an activity are you addicted to what you really want in a human sense?
Yeah that’s the problem. Ultimately, people want to distract themselves more than they want to connect with people.
And with both in the same platform… I know where I’m going.
I think another problem are network effects. They make it much harder to build a reasonable alternative
There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting with the people you know. Group chats.
Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.
It makes one wonder whether "what I want" is really the best thing to optimize for.
It is what people wanted though, from Facebook. Most people, including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger (iMessage, etc.)
Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a small niche in the market
> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage
I've never seen this, despite frequently being irritated with Facebook mainly showing me random shit I don't care about.
Companies always squirrel away the "works correctly" button and then are like whelp nobody is using the thing we hid! Nothing we can do!
> it is what people wanted though, from Facebook.
I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.
I think it's more like a restaurant offering both candy and burgers.
When candy sales outpace burgers, they're naturally going to invest more in candy. Eventually, they start to compete more with Hershey's than McDonald's.
Businesses evolve or die, no?
I guess the problem with this analogy is that it fails to capture the essential nature of Facebook: that its base product ("hamburgers") has a network effect, and the new product ("candy") doesn't.
If Facebook is a social network for seeing my friends, then there's nowhere else for me to go. They're on Facebook and it's unlikely they're all going to join some new network at the same time.
If Facebook is a high engagement content farm designed to shove random engagement-bait in my face, then it's just competing with Reddit, Digg, Twitter, 4chan, TikTok. Folks can get addicted to this in the short term; but they can also get bored and move on to another app. Based on conversations with all the IRL human beings I know, this is what they've all done. (The actual question I have is: who is still heavily using the site? Very old people?)
> Businesses evolve or die, no?
What I constantly see, are businesses that would be just fine continue doing the same, but die instead because they tried to evolve into something and alienated all their existing customers/users and couldn't attract new ones because what they evolved into made no sense. But no, businesses want to take over the world (or at least have a large slice from the pie) so they "evolve" no matter what.
Case in point: Facebook.
Numbers must go up. In the stock market anything steady state is dead.
This isn’t quite true. There are many businesses like Colgate that are steady state with a reasonable amount of growth that do fine in the stock market.
Infinite growth!!! How silly we still are as a species. The more of us there are, the stupider we act, and we don't even do anything to prevent it, we just let the consequences of our own stupidity roll over us one day, when they can no longer be stopped.
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.
> 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’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."
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...
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.
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).
Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.
Eh, I think the parent has a point. You underline it yourself when you say “people they already know”.
The internet didn’t always involve a choice between “talk to people I know” vs “bravely/foolishly taking on the vitriol of a wild horde of angry delusional maniacs”, but now we’ve lost almost all of the space in between those extremes. People like hacker news exactly because it’s the rare place that’s still in the middle *(sometimes, on some topics, for now)
>overthinking
Ah, the self-referential thought-terminating cliche. Favorite invention of XXI century by far.
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.
>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.
Sounds like you’d have appreciated 90s era irc, which was good for nuanced and sincere discussion, but also did not require talking to people that you already knew.
There’s a sweet spot between open/closed and known/unknown and somewhat focused but not too niche where it kind of works. Theres a certain size that works too, ideally Lots of users and yet occasionally you recognize someone. But I don’t think that’s what people mean at all by group chat today, which regardless of venue tends to be rather more insular and thus echo’y.
In IRC, and as many do here, you used an alias to have the confidence to speak freely. Products like WhatsApp where people reveal their real identities don't lend themselves to that frankness when membership is open.
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
I'm in a similar group but using Discord. It seems that lack of advertising or any kind of algo feed is the common feature. Who runs your Telegram server?
Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).
Neither can Discord; its usage of "server" in particular is a weaponized misappropriation.
>Who runs your Telegram server?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service
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.
And markets are growing.
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.
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.
Did they become less popular? I think they are just less visible by nature, they've always been pretty common. I guess some people switched to Facebook Groups for a time, but even that is sort of a form of group chat.
They never worked properly on phones, including images/video and history. Same for SMS chats on top of being hideously expensive because the phone companies thought it was still the 1960s.
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.
The kids are alright. They are going back to IRC.
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?
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 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.
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
>...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group
For me personally, this is a feature not a bug. I want things I see to be things that somebody wrote just for that channel. It's why I use group chat over social media.
Facebook had and still has visibility options, but as it grew in features people forgot about it. A lesson in discoverability and product complexity.
https://www.facebook.com/help/233739099984085/
Isn't it pretty common for the "share" function to allow selecting multiple recipients, including multiple groups?
Yes, but who remembers that? There are so many features.
I'd like to see the usage history of that feature. I bet my bottom dollar it's decreased over time.
I bet kids these days don't even know how to do a hostile channel takeover with a bunch of eggdrops.
Say hello to iRC
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Write an algorithm to maximize in app time, so he ended up building a content media platform not a social one. If the goal is to show as many ads as possible, you will always end up with more media than social
>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?
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..
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?
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.
https://mobilizon.org/ ?
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?
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
In my country (CZ) Facebook is now only used by people 40+ for Russian/Anti-government propaganda (and it works sadly)
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
> 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?
Seriously, talk about self fulfilling. "We stopped showing people content from their friends, and people started spending less time viewing content from their friends. It's inexplicable, really."
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.
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.
Instagram actually used to be quite nice when it was pics of friends. Now I find it scary.
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.
It seems to largely be a mirror for tik-tok these days.
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.
> The last thing I want to see is what random people I don't know are posting
Most of us right here?
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_?
Visiting friends' profiles, they still seem to be posting but I rarely see them on my feed.
No I haven't got them muted or anything haha, and I can't speak for why the algorithm thinks I don't want to see the content. Maybe it's broken.
Looking for cause and effect in a feedback loop is a fool's errand
Those aren’t mutually exclusive options. Facebook wants to always have new things to show people so they stay on the site, but it was absolutely their choice to deprioritize your friends’ posts below advertisers and the “engaging” slop.
Some mid-level manager idiot's a/b test revealed that they could maximize engagement by showing more rage bait and less family. This increased revenue and nobody wants to suggest a change that lowers it.
Yeah, how about improving Facebook (which has been neglected for years) instead of building out Threads (which nobody needs)?
This is why I left Facebook and I'm sure it drove away many others.
GitHub and X are the only social media I respect :-)
Social media has died many years ago. What we are left with is corporate media.
some say it never started
Zucchini my boy, it's over because you killed it
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.
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.
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
Does this confirm at least part of the dead internet theory?
The internet's not dead. The web maybe.
So there is now a new possbility to create a new social network, retro style in a sense.
sudo nano /etc/hosts page down, add 0.0.0.0 facebook.com 0.0.0.0 linkedin.com 0.0.0.0 adobe.com Ctrl z
Life is so much better now.
No longer works if you use Safari on macOS.
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.
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.
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.
So how is this different from people sitting in front of a TV and watching endless samey series?
Only that it's portable.
If we didn't have "social media" we'd be all watching samey tv series on our phones.
It absolutely makes a difference because tv shows are usually 20 mins at least, which means watching 3 minutes in the supermarket line is actually a bad experience, so it requires more deliberation.
I’d also argue that the average TV show is more edifying than the average social media post but that’s another topic.
> 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...
There is a good reason I don't stock my freezer with microwave pizza.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t be surprised if your family gets radicalized with some idea they were against just a generation ago. Facebook and social media is so many bad things at the same time: propaganda, surveilance, consumerism, deception, addiction, and complete isolation from one another. I find social media responsible for a lot of modern ills in our society.
IG has slowly become a gateway to OF hasn't it?
My recommendations are _full_ of girls with very few clothes on doing sports, showcasing outfits and whatnot. IG is just broken at this point.
> IG is just broken at this point.
It's all broken because the incentives are all broken. Everything is optimized for maximum profit through maximum screen time and maximum ad impressions.
If anything the online advertisement industry has shown that it cannot be trusted as a means to support businesses while having those businesses provide a healthy, no addictive, worth having product.
Would it truly hurt Facebook, Google or YouTube to make less money. Many companies could provide better solutions, if they where happy with less profit.
If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.
>If you don't look at those posts (and even flag one as "not interested" when it pops up) they go away pretty quickly.
this is broken, I get stupid posts with same image, about body parts and english words for them, I marked it as not interested at least 3 times, but it appears again and again from other poster . So FB is incapable to now show me the exact same thing over and over again despite me telling them 3 times I am not interested.
Also I doing some math stuff with my son so now I am getting images with math in them, tracking really works
Flagging them will clean it up for a while, but I find eventually it will show you a few more here and there. If you stop scrolling and ogle for a little bit then it starts feeding you more again.
But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it? ;-)
I get what you're getting too, also wall-of-texts multi-image posts, often content reposted from reddit, I guess the algorithm thinks "Oh, user is engaged for many seconds with all the images on posts like this, gotta serve them more of them!".
I've programmed Tasker to kill Instagram after a minute of me opening it and I've made another Tasker script that asks me to input a 9-digit random number, makes me wait between 5-45 seconds and then allows me 10 minutes of the app before making me do the whole process again.
Women with few clothes (sadly) always grab my attention, yes. But I think that content is also being pushed despite my attention to other things because it works in general.
But you get the point, the recommendations are just a stream of nonsense-content, screenshots of screenshots of Reddit posts...
I don't get it. Either there's no good, original content available out there or the algorithm just doesn't want to show it.
> But is it not observing what grabs your attention, and then serving you more of it?
I'm reasonably certain clicking into a piece of content to block the account still counts as more engagement for that type of content. They don't seem to have a "clicked, then immediately blocked" sort of signal.
There is a workaround to clean up IG: I only use the browser to view it, even on mobile, and I use Firefox + uBlock Origin and the following filter:
www.instagram.com##article:has-text(Suggested for you):style(visibility: hidden !important; height: 300px !important; overflow: hidden !important)
Whenever using a Meta product I have to be hyper-aware of what i stop scrolling on or click on, because Meta is all about "revealed preference" instead of what I explicitly tell them I follow and like.
IE: Don't let your eyes linger on eyecandy on Meta's platforms or they will feed you a firehose of horny slop.
Very true and I think is part of their business model. A more lonely/isolated user is more likely to buy stuff to soothe themselves thus clicking in the advertisements they show.
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.
Yes, they themselves are making more and more efforts to isolate each individual user. Facebook or VK - but the essence is the same
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the only thing keeping you on Facebook is sources of specific content, you're looking for a platform that also has sources of that specific content. So it depends on what that content is, doesn't it?
You gotta find those small communities. I'm into 4wheel drives and use facebook groups but I'm often on Ih8mud now. Just a better place to be imo. You got to find where your people are at
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.
> discoverability is a known problem
Is it? Are you sure centralized authorities for "discovery" are a good thing? After all, the "discovery" algorithm is making people move off FB to Mastodon...
The Something Awful forums.
Maybe there are subreddits or discord servers about your topics
Can operator be used to extract my social network data from fb?
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 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
https://toggr.io
Don't remember the last time I saw a post from a friend in Instagram. It is just random shit and ads
You can turn off suggested posts in settings, but Instragram flagrantly turns them back on after 30 days.
Social media has now reached a state of equilibrium with normal society.
And we killed it
>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
The disproportionate amount of impact this one hit wonder had on civilization is astonishing.
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” 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.
The other hits came from breaking laws against anti-competitive behavior by his company, which is the exact subject of the trial this article is based on.
Buying WhatsApp was about having the money and not being obviously blocked by courts.
Not exactly galaxy brain to decide to buy a lottery ticket that's already declared the winning one.
And not like they ruined it, I mean integrated/synergized it.
lots of people had money. Only mark bought whatsapp
It was a defensive acquisition most likely and the app has pretty much not changed functionally one bit from when he acquired it. He had no vision for it clearly.
I'm getting a bit of reddit vibes in that you only took part of what I said out of context, and ignored the rest.
But also yes it was very much a defensive acquisition, and my point about them not (yet) ruining it shows that there was no plan.
Buying another company from the spoils of your first hit doesn't make you not a one hit wonder. Especially since most of your bidding competitors would have been blocked by antitrust.
I don't know if the same is true for Instagram. I've never used it.
True. He hasn't actually built anything since the very first days.
> 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.
it's over for me 10 years ago, I spent 10 minutes annually on facebook, life is good without it.
Same. I closed my FB account 16 years ago and I've never once missed it.
This also means it is now the time to reinvent Social Media.
Why bother reinventing it? The only social apps that have ever been needed are basic chat apps (group or private) and tools for meeting up in real life (such as group chats).
Everything else has always only ever been fluff.
Or we can let it become a relic.
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.
In my life this has been replaced by group chats on WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal etc
You mean make them as they originally were? Sure, but better learn lessons about how FB ended up such a shithole while still massively used, or you will just repeat that lesson (while massively less successful due to initial momentum)
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.
Thank God!!!
$ URL="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/mark-zucke..."
$ lynx -dump $URL | less
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.
Long live the Fediverse!
Says the man who killed it. Has he even used his own product in recent years?
you know what this means
he has plans to start injecting "feed content" (eg shrimp jesus) into whatsapp group chats
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.
I consider all Meta employees culpable for enabling this company and I will blacklist you all when I am reviewing your resumes. You are wealthy and educated enough to know better but you chose to make money at the expense of the world around you.
Comments for this article - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43780363
Mark sounds like he negotiates as well as his "Art of the Deal" buddy Donald.
That's really fucking gross.
Someone who is willing to sell their life, including naming their literal child, and all of their morals that might exist, for cash, is gross. Zuck is gross and should be embarrassed.
He's winning at money but losing at human.
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...
Them grapes are mighty sour, eh?
Social media is just fine.
Yes, paying people to post content has created a wider divide between content-creators and social follows, but social follows still exist.
It's just Facebook that is over.
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.
> connect with friends an not much else
Not necessarily. Breaking the companies up will foster innovation via competition. Who knows what will come out of it? Will it be better than Facebook burning stacks of cash on Zuck's latest fancy(XR/AI/?)? How long will the market be confident in his dollar pyromania? I will short that company like there's no tomorrow if I was in any position to do so.
This is more my opinion than time and market-backed statement but I don't believe addictive design is good for the long-term market positions of those companies because they may be addictive now but a lot of people loathe them* and are looking to escape from their design. They will jump on whatever comes next and not look back. What's good for the company long-term is to provide value to the user - local groups, FB marketplace, etc and become embedded in the culture and society.
* needs citation but it looks like the article supports this view
Sure, I also hate what all of this is doing to society and people more generally! But it's also fair to say he is actually correct in saying that social media as we know it is over and it's now about generic content consumption.
actually its alive and well on bluesky...my profile:
https://bsky.app/profile/fredgrott.bsky.social
join me on on bluesky
Good fucking riddance. Now do smartphones.
If social media is over, how does Meta's revenues keep climbing?
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.
Well, thank god for that.
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.
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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.
X is full of bots and forcefeed content.
You don't have to follow the bots.
My feed is amazing tech content and people attempting to do crazy things. It's pretty awesome.
Name one amazing thing on X.
Virtue signaling political incorrectness is the only reason I can imagine people promoting Twitter right now.
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
Musk bans people all the time. Remember the jet tracker?
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.
No there are not. There are a bunch of moronic VCs saying incredibly stupid things and paying for blue checkmarks.
Literally all the Deep learning and systems whizs are on X.
dril
Also on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/dril.bsky.social