$ lynx -dump $URL | less
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...
You join Mastodon and want to find a specific friend.
Good luck!
People are accustomed to using centralised sites. They search by typing the target's name into a search box and get presented with a collection of options. That's less successful on Mastodon.
Ask for their username? How do you think people found each others email addresses?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
Ah, the self-referential thought-terminating cliche. Favorite invention of XXI century by far.
... what? I'm in my late 30's and group chats have been a part of life for myself, my friends and my family since the late 90's. I've never wanted to share my views with "the world at large" online, but I have no problem being myself and sharing my views in meatspace, where being open and honest about who I am is far more impactful to those I interact with and the world around me than it ever has been on social media.
Within the world of the pop-web, even on this website to a point, the ability to have a truly nuanced discussion has essentially been eliminated. People would rather throw out hot takes based on disingenuous interpretations of someone's comment/statement rather than try and have an impactful, open conversation.
There’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.
That's why we all use group chats and messaging. There's no safe alternative
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.
What stops people from being part of X group chats? All a connection on their own?
I do that in Signal, I have group chats with different circles of friends ,and we also regularly create short-lived purpose-built chats for events or other things...
It's a bit more friction perhaps but in the end it works well and we've been doing it for years.
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?
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.
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.
These days the field is much narrower but 10+ years ago finding an app that supported everyone's device was a challenge.
Not really. There's still no iPad version.
My friend installed Whatsapp from the App Store for their iPad, to find it didn't behave quite as expected, and didn't match their phone and desktop experience.
That turned out to be because it was an app from some random third party with its own features. It used Whatsapp in the name, and had a similar logo.
When my friend realised they were unexpectedly using a third party app, from a provider they'd never heard of, they were worried they'd accidentally given away access to their account full of sensitive messages to someone they didn't trust.
I was surprised my cautious friend would install the wrong app by mistake, as the Apple app store is normally good for well known services.
While scrolling through Whatsapp apps, it took me a while to realise the top search result, which my friend had installed, wasn't actually from Whatsapp (but looked similar). Even though the logo was a little different, I assumed that was just a quirk. It's just so unexpected to find that what you get on iPad isn't the real thing, when searching for Whatsapp gets you the real thing if you're looking from an iPad or Mac.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everything hypey overshoots eventually, but nobody knows exactly when!
But I don't think monetization matters too much. Ms tried making the botched Skype play, and as a company there's no way they didn't understand the value of hundreds of millions of eyeballs, daily usage market share. They understood that with IE, despite it being a zero-revenue product in and of itself.
> when the mobile ecosystem didn’t support their legacy persistent-connection-style protocols
You may know more about this then I do - what's the main difference? I used them back in the day and as end-user they felt the exact same as modern messaging apps. I send a message, it gets saved on some server, the receiver gets it from there. When I used it, it definitely didn't require both parties to be online to send/receive.
Or is it about the notifications?
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).
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."
Are kids really that simplistically divided?
iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.
It defies belief how much some demographics care about this stuff, I didn't believe it when I first heard either. Some of it is improving with RCS but its got a ways to go.
Does it justify their reason for hating on Android/green bubbles? Of course not, but that's 100% the reality of the situation.
This may not seem like a big deal to you, but if you remember what it's like to be a kid, you should get it. The smallest friction can be a reason to exclude someone socially.
Here in Europe, everybody uses WhatsApp and/or similar products for chat and they are all multi platform.
The reasons why are varied (everything from wealth signalling to switching being a pain and iphone mostly had a first mover advantage for quality and availability for the first several years), but it's only in the last two years that I've seen people start to use multi-platform chat apps here. Most of my peer group with other parents all default to imessage group chats for sharing photos, stories of our kids.
I am also starting to notice a loosening on apple's services. Spotify is used by more people than Apple music even amungst the apple households I know.
https://leafandcore.com/2019/08/24/green-bubbles-are-a-turn-...
https://outsidethebeltway.com/the-dreaded-green-bubble/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
https://gizmodo.com/im-buying-an-iphone-because-im-ashamed-o...
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/28/1241473453/why-green-text-bub...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-an...
My original post has enough receipts. If you don’t believe me you’re free to remain wrong.
These memes posted on short video sites also have parallel ones of women making fun of guys who try to do the whole “hold on let me pirate this movie and HDMI connect it to the TV thing” instead of having Netflix.
Idk what the stats are on this, but anecdotally, all my friends use FB Messenger if they want cross-platform group chat, but that's slowly changing to some fragmented list of alternatives. And usually it's not for semi-important things like get-together plans.
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.
if i see a photo that a friend broadcasts out once on a social feed, i see it and move on.
if a friend puts a photo in a text/group chat, i know that it's something they wanted to share with me
I'd like to see the usage history of that feature. I bet my bottom dollar it's decreased over time.
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.
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.
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...
I bet it's really simple from the vantage point of being the owner of the biggest social app with billions to spare.
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.
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.
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?
Facebook is all slop nowadays. X is amazing thoughj.
My feed is amazing tech content and people attempting to do crazy things. It's pretty awesome.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Most of us right here?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a separate legal argument and as I understand it not necessary to qualify a as monopoly.
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.
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.
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.
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
Why show an event that happened last Friday? They even know it's time sensitive because it's an event with a date and time attached!
Clearly I’m a minority as I’m sure they have research saying it does drive engagement for large Numbers of people, but Facebook appears to be worse for all that other stuff and as a result is failing everyone.
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.
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
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.
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.
The good news is that capitalism is in fact really good at serving exactly the preferences you reveal through your actions, and there are ways in which that is good. The bad news is that the farther away we get from our "native environment" the farther our needs and revealed preferences are diverging. I can think of no equivalent threat in our ancestral environment to "scrolling away your day on Facebook". Sloth and laziness aren't new, but that enticement to it is very new.
The discipline to sit, think with your brain, and realize with your system 2 brain [1] that you need to harness and control your system 1 urges is moving from "a recipe to live a good life" (e.g., wisdom literature, Marcus Aurelius, Proverbs, Confucious, many many other examples dating back thousands of years), but one a lot of people lived reasonably happily without, to a necessity to thrive in the modern environment. Unfortunately, humans have never, ever been collectively good at that.
And the level of brutality that system 2 must use on system 1 is going up, too. Resisting an indulgent dinner is one thing; carrying around the entire internet in your pocket and resisting darned near every vice simultaneously, continuously, is quite another. In my lifetime this problem has sharpened profoundly from minor issue to major problem everyone faces every hour.
For a much older example, see "drugs". Which is also a new example as the frontier expands there, too.
I have no idea what a solution to this at scale looks like. But I am quite optimistic we will ultimately find one, because we will have to. The systems can't just keep getting better and better at enticement to the short-term with no other social reaction.
[1]: https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system...
The cable company, as you might expect, is completely and utterly awful. They go for all of cable's greatest hits, from low introductory payments that explode after the first year, to service that is constantly down, to sending you to collections for equipment you returned. They do it all. The speeds are slow, and the customer service is non-existent.
The coop, on the other hand, is beyond delightful. The speed always exceeds what I'm paying for, and every couple of years they readjust their packages to give me more speed for the same price. Only three times in almost a decade have I had any problems with them: One was an outage that was caused by a natural disaster, and the other two were problems with my ONT that were fixed next day at no charge. Oh, and since it's a coop, I get a check every year as part of the profit sharing. For me, it only equates to about a free month of service, but it's still pretty nice.
So I guess the tl;dr of it all is that you don't need to get rid of free markets to have social control of things. And since the profits go to the people paying for the service, there's no incentive to extract extra value, so there's no real enshitification.
As a system for discovering price, free markets work really well. The downsides comes from politicians not understanding/caring the limitations of free markets and what kinds of problems they're simply not intended to solve. These are the economic factors beyond price. More broadly, they're our values.
If we outsource the need for philosophy/wisdom to the free markets then there is no reason why the market will not demand child labor, 7 day work weeks, single use everything, and privatized security forces. We failed to take action earlier, and the same kind of stuff has already happened to the environment. Not to mention that gambling and security fraud are making a comeback.
Huh? They were explicitly built for that purpose, not "trending towards". Without content consumption, those platforms are nothing.
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.
The only use for Facebook is for the marketplace.
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.
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.
maybe that way they would improve things a bit
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.
Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.
But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only things keeping FB alive.
Once people get sufficiently frustrated and the ad revenue declines below the cost of running the servers, we will immediately lose all of the information shared there. None of it will be archived like the old forums. It's a genuinely sad situation.
Does anyone know why facebook does this? It's the most infuriating thing, like it's assuming the poor user doesn't know how to "refresh" a page so it does it for them, because clearly they got stuck on an old crusty piece of content.
How so? I find FB groups strictly worse than old-school forums.
The ways fb is (still) the most useful to users are the ones meta cares the least about.
Were it not for distant family using it, I would almost certainly download my content and nuke my account.
This is accurate as far as I'm concerned. Interacting directly with actual friends; no ads or clickbait content injected.
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 have a bookmark that took me directly to the friends feed but it would seem it just redirects to the homepage now, and the navigating to the feeds fresh just loads within the page rather than via URL (at least on mobile web, m.facebook.com, not checked desktop)
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.
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.
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)
I'll echo what others have said - if social media is dead, it's because they killed it themselves.
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'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
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!
I have now grown tired of all of that and, when I realised that it had been ages since I had seen someone I actually know post anything, I deactivated it all.
My FB feed, by comparison, was almost exactly like yours - not just irrelevant interests, but geographically crazy irrelevant interests.
(The same people Zuckerberg was accused of bullying out of the company)
(note that if you click Friends or Feeds you will see somewhat more personal content, but basically, the main stream is just a list of irrelevant garbage)
One thing that amazes me is that Facebook thinks I'm interested in content I was interested in more than 25 years ago before Facebook even existed. It's mysterious.
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.
After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.
This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.
If you had a friend who in the middle of interactions habitually pulled out a bag of cocaine and snorted some (or gambled), you wouldn't say they were giving positive feedback to the dealer (/casino). You'd say they were annoying and unable to function.
What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
But it is a positive feedback loop in a technical sense. Think of a microphone providing sound to an amplifier, and that amplifier in turn providing amplified sound into the original microphone. It's self-reinforcing.
> What happens on Instagram if you vote dislike/ignore attention-bait clips and try to find longer-form (>10 minute) content, and use searches rather than feed?
The thing is, I don't want to be on Instagram. It's basically TV for me, and I'd rather not engage with content that way because it's passive and messes up my attention span. I already stare at a screen for eight hours a day for work, and I'd rather not have to spend any more time on screens than I have to.
But of course if they'd done that Meta wouldn't be worth a hundred gazillion dollars now.
The testimony is disingenuous, but true. People see less of their friends because they are show less of their friends. Friends post less becuase no one sees it.
Unfortunately capturing user attention is also the best way to sell advertising, so it makes sense that all their products converged on algo feeds.
No, it wasn't conscious, they just incrementally and iteratively optimized the site to maximize page views and ad revenue. Turns out that ends up eventually killing it - without ever having the intention of doing so. But you can rest assured that every decision on that long, slippery slope optimized some metric toward a local maxima.
It's been 8 years since my last post on Facebook and I visit less than 10 mins a year (only because I have one friend who uses FB messenger to communicate with me when he's traveling).
The essence of enshittification is product leadership losing the plot on their users' desires and piloting everything off the cliff by solely following growth metrics.
Our CEO immediately adopted a north star of 'revenue', again just shoving end-users into a pile for exploitation. Companies are not making products to solve an end-user issue, or even add value. The VC is the customer, and if your fb feed and IG is toxic, it's because that's working well for the investors.
The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.
I use FBP: https://www.fbpurity.com/faq.htm
Desktop - left sidebar, Feeds > Friends.
Mobile - Friends button on the bottom menu.
Not perfect, but cuts out 90% of the garbage.
https://www.theverge.com/news/637668/facebook-friends-only-f...
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 100% agree that I cannot see a future where people think this is healthy and can continue.
The first is not a prerequisite for the second. See: fast-food, car-optimized cities, Electron apps, microplastics, AI-controlled drone warfare, trap music, etc.
We've broadly seen this on FB with American Millenials (the "core" original FB demographic, there's only so much people can take or so much "value" they get from sinking their time there.
That seems accurate to me, and it makes me think of the old-media saying, "If it bleeds, it leads." In other words, anything to get eyeballs/clicks.
Meet the new-media. Same as the old-media.
I guess I could restrict my Facebooking to desktop if it still works there but then I'll visit even less haha
Facebook doesn't even seem to care that their platform is being strangled with fake posts. At least Twitter/X has the excuse that Elon fired the people who were trying to combat the spam. I don't know what Facebook's excuse is.
About a year ago a video went viral where someone in a romantic relationship demonstrated that the opinions expressed in comments on videos shown to her differ radically from the opinions expressed in comments on the exact same video when viewed by her significant other using his account.
My wife and I then immediately verified that this was true for us as well.
Well, there is a 'tab' (at least on mobile) that is eventually marked 'Friends' buried inside 'Feeds'. The irony is lost on Zuck I suppose, as that used to be the front 'page' and KSP of Facebook.
All of my friends and family just have big whatsapp groups instead.
Guess what will be the next target of randomly inserted ads?
FB defence would be that they are like a telecom company and aren't responsible what is said over the phone. But if they are pushing scammer to call you, then they should be co-liable.
I opened mine, and the first post was from a friend, as were about 75% of the remainder of the posts. The other 25% were from Facegroup groups I joined.
There were zero news stories, and zero AI stuff.
edit: s/tells/reels
A friend's dad died and I didn't know for 5 days. He was busy dealing with everything that comes with such a major life event, posted it to facebook assuming that would be an effective way to communicate it.
Reddit and other discussion sites: Controlled by "basement dwellers"(i.e. doomers w/ too much free time), trolls and, soon, AI bots. Dominated by groupthink and devoid of friendly discussion.
I think the only exception is my local community page on Facebook. People do seem to be civil(real names and close physical proximity help) and it's all real content.
I sometimes have the feeling that most HN commenters are also unemployed or in academia and most non-commenting readers are employed.
If only there was a reputation based site where, idk, people with more accomplishments got more weight...
Twitter is, in a way, like that. I can follow, say, John Carmack, and get things he says or has reposted and ignore content from people I don't care about. I think that's why I still find myself there. It's a high signal-to-noise site where I can still participate(and actually have discussions with high achievers and ignore basement dwellers. Vs say reddit where I'm constantly dragged down into debates with the basement dwellers).
Very good point. I personally find Reddit or HN fairer since it doesn’t depend so much on reputation (actually: popularity). But you are right there is a benefit to weighing certain people more. I sometimes wonder whether people like Dijkstra or Feynman would have bubbled up on Twitter too. I guess so. Both were pretty outspoken so the algorithm would pick up on that like people would pick up on Feyman lectures or Dijkstra letters. They had some virality about them.
The other day something popped up in the Facebook Android app advertising a new feature to "just see your friends' posts" and when I clicked on that, it really did only show me friend posts and a couple actual ads. I can't find it in the app anymore, though. It's what should be the default view. It's the only thing I will ever care about.
I'm willing to accept a reasonable amount of advertisement as a necessary evil to support the service. What I can't understand is why I'm seeing an endless stream of garbage memes from random accounts that I do not follow and couldn't care less about. Stop "suggesting" things to me. I don't want to "Follow" these morons. I never intentionally interact with any of them, yet I'm flooded with them.
There's little chance of me making it to the end of this year without deleting Facebook entirely. It does nothing to keep me connected to friends anymore, because it hides 99% of their posts unless I view their profiles one at a time, and the few things it does put in my feed are lost in the noise.
(That plus having FBP installed.)
Still feels like my friends never post any more, except for like 1% of them?
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.
Everything else has always only ever been fluff.
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?
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.
</SARCASM>
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?)
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'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!
Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences.
But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left.
If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.
Because everything about the Facebook user interface discourages its use.
What if, and I know this is craaaaazy, the friend feed was just the feed? Facebook was growing fine with that.
Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.
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
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.
-under network effects, you can’t spin up a viable indie alternative (like you could for a note taking app) because you need to massively attract users
-the less engaging social platform is the less economically viable social platform
So the natural end point for any social app is content doomscrolling
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.
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 might fine tune this to "users most likely to click ads"
With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.
Open a restaurant masquerading as providing high-quality, locally sourced organic food, discreetly sprinkle the hardest drug on the most popular plates, slowly increase the dosage until people are completely hooked, and voilà, you can legitimately claim "people wanted the drug; it was their choice."
Sure there are nice small restaurants. But look at all the big chains.
And we all probably would want it if we tried! It's not that we're in any way better than the folks suffering from opioid addiction. It's all just chance.
1. At-scale boycott: would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it? But somehow, this doesn't work for "social" media -- we're all aware what it is, yet we still use it, unironically.
2. Regulation: if a food inspector eats at your restaurant and confirms rumours that your food is actually addictive, your restaurant will get shut down. But somehow, FB/IG/etc. can operate without regulation, and free of any consequences. Sarah Wynn-Williams' book "Careless People" is worth reading.
This is largely a communication problem. Fentanyl is unacceptable, but a large subset of people would be glad to get food with CBD oil for free. Or caffeine - as last year's Panera charged lemonade scandal [1] revealed. Or alcohol, that's already very normal. Or monosodium glutamate, a personal favorite of mine which was once surrounded by negative press, or high-fructose corn syrup, or trans-saturated fats. Or maybe not an intentional part of the food, but traces of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics may end up in food, and microplastics or PFOS from packaging will be eaten as well. And I'm sure you've seen old advertisements for cure-all elixirs that contained cocaine.
Health experts know that certain ingredients are bad, and many others are regularly consumed in quantities far, far exceeding their safe levels, but you don't have to look too deeply at a grocery store shelf or fast food menu to realize that the contents are boycott worthy but normalized to the point of being inescapable.
People know even less about what Meta is doing with their data or what their addictive apps do to their brains, and are equally powerless to learn about it or change it.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-drinks-ca...
The fact that Zuck (and Elon) are all buddy buddy with the current admin in Washington shouldn't be lost in the conversation.
Well, part of that is because people got addicted gradually, starting before it was common knowledge. Another part of it is that people actually do need to use these services (for some reasonable definition of "need") because some friends, family members, government/community services, etc. can only be contacted via these services.
It started as small roaster of coffee but now it’s a Sugar+Caffeine drink system for addicts.
It turns out that demand matters when you sell a product or a service. And it is elastic in ways other than price (such as convenience, value, appeal), but not infinitely so. In plain English, you can force anti-social media onto the market by making it appealing/hooking/addictive/convenient/supposedly valuable for a while, but not indefinitely. People do demand proper socializing, especially recently. Many are realizing they've been sold a total bag of goods just because they consumed it, and it's not good enough to displace real human connection.
My takeaway from that presentation is more that:
* Games cost more to make but there is resistance from players to pay more
* A number of growth areas (mobile, social gaming, displacing other forms of media, battle royale) are exhausted
* A lot of attention in China is moving to Chinese-made games
* The marketplace is overcrowded with titles
* Gaming is more social now, so a significant number of users are sticking to the same big 5/10 games where there friends are, which leaves even less room for the zillions of new games to gain traction.
I think the industry had a role in this, namely in locking people in to games, and simultaneously overspending on and underpricing games. But I'm not getting the sense (at least from this presentation) that the new games that are coming out aren't what users want.
Just like Facebook, the first-mover advantage has favored many now-established studios and franchises. They exploded game-development costs because they could, and funneled these costs into marketing and moat features indie developers could not build (such as huge open worlds, amazing sweaty character face wrinkle rendering tech, and SOTA systems). But many of these companies did not respect the player's wishes for well play-tested games with interesting stories and mechanics. Still, they captured the top 20-30 franchise part of the annual net bookings, and strongly compete in the top-50 game part. Some even built some black hole games (GTA Online, Rainbow Six: Siege, Fortnite). For a long time, they avoided much of the pressures felt strongly by smaller companies. They were "above" the 99% of games that have to compete for close to 1% of the revenues. Their marketing was so strong (plus, they strengthened it with access journalism) and features so moated, they could do no wrong.
However, over the last 5 years, things have changed. Many AAA industry legends have left their jobs at major studios to start small studios and create games as a form of interactive art, rather than to make publishers rich. Ultimately, in their view, the greed and blind following of what players would consume (trends) in large numbers led to a sterile industry that could no longer create art.
The growth engines got exhausted because players did not actually demand what they were offering, such as season passes, eSports corporate shooters, microtransactions, padded playtimes, user-generated content, and the other things. The new growth engines (AI, targeting kids, etc) are also what the players don't want very much. The industry understands it, and investors are starting to catch on after facing a decade of poor returns, too. The crucial point I am trying to make is that the industry spent a lot of money on these growth engines that the players didn't truly want, led by market metrics that genuinely showed they were consuming it. But now the gig is up, the writing is on the wall, and everyone inside and out of the industry sees it.
As a contrast, many Eastern companies (Nintendo is an especially prominent example) stuck to classic pricing models, did not inflate the cost of their games with their money for moat (most indie developers can make games to compete with Nintendo outside of the IP), and never used the growth engines used in the West. These companies, along with many people in them whom I know personally, are largely unaffected by the industry crisis. They were always making games their users wanted.
Finally, I have to say, the industry is split in two. 8/10 AAA companies are struggling because they cling to the growth engines (old and new) that the players don't want. About 2/10 game developers and publishers genuinely build games that people want, even in the West. And now that the pressure is up, some AAA executives from the 8/10ths are becoming acutely aware of this. Emphasis on "some". So, yes, the industry in some part was, is, and will continue to make games that players want. But the more interesting part for our discussion is the large part of it that wasn't, isn't, and perhaps won't be.
Of course, there's some probability I'm reading this wrong. I'm making my business bets in the industry based on it, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily right.
And thanks for reading the report before engaging in the discussion. That is appreciated.
It's a little bit more involved than that. Games don't have to cost much more to make, they just are due to declining quality of leadership and poor executive decisions. It's more like, "AAA studios are running their budgets up (arbitrarily, usually not driven by any customer request or engagement)" and "players are resistant to paying for that".
"Clair Obscur Expedition 33" literally just came out a few days ago. It's gorgeous high-fidelity AAA-like art, it's super well done, it's incredibly well received, and it's retailing at $50 ($60 for the 'Deluxe Edition') at launch (not including current steam sale). It's doing great, because they made a great product, kept to a reasonable budget, and sold it at a reasonable price. Oblivion also just got a remaster at the same pricing by Virtuos, and it's doing really well. Baldur's Gate 3 is also another example, amazing title, AAA quality graphical fidelity, $60 launch pricing (digitally on Steam & GOG, anyway).
Compare that to something like Ubisoft's "Star Wars Outlaws", which was $70 digital base ($130 Deluxe Edition) at launch. Yes, it's high-fidelity and AAA-like too, but it's very much not well done, it's not well received, and it's arbitrarily super expensive on top of all of that.
Games don't just "cost more to make" automatically, it's mostly not based on inflation or underlying costs. AAA studios are increasingly more mismanaged (or just demanding higher margins) than they did before, and that mismanagement is impacting their cost structures. Instead of fixing those mistakes, companies are expecting players to just forever eat those additional costs.
If the game is really, really good, they might get away with it. (Nintendo, probably). If their games aren't that good, players are going to walk (Ubisoft).
It's not "the market is saturated". It's not "the market is overcrowded". It's "the market is competitive and expects quality", you can't just shove a half-baked only-ok game at high pricing, and expect it to be a success.
No it isn't. No one "wants" to be addicted.
> Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.
They will measure you then do everything they can to increase the number of minutes you spend on the site. The media recommendation is a consequence of cost. It's very cheap for them to maximize your time spent using other peoples content.
> It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.
There are tons of ways to get dopamine flowing into your brain. Which is why it was important for Meta to monopolize and dominate the field. Turns out lizard brains are exceptionally fickle.
Social media is just fine. Trillion dollar ad conglomerate staffing menlo park software engineers making 500k/yr? That requires enshittification.
I also browse random junk on xitter. It's a different thing.
It’s actually what users want “now”. When instagram initially stopped chronological feed users didn’t want it. When they started injecting random posts from people you didn’t follow. Users didn’t want that either. When they launched reels, they also didn’t want that. When they started almost exclusively showing reels like TikTok, users still didn’t want that.
The problem with all of the above is that users eventually got used to the new norm and their brains established the dopamine rewards pathways according to what they were offered. And that’s why they think they “want” it now.
But we’ve seen this happen before. FB did the exact thing and now it’s almost dead, even Zuckerberg acknowledged it. But they somehow think, users won’t eventually get off Instagram because somehow this time it’s different?
I check Facebook less than once a month. I want to see what my distant friends are doing. Instead though I see subversive political memes, and other things (jokes) that are fun once in a while but not worth spending much time on. Because Facebook isn't giving me what I really want I gave up on them. But it took me a while in part because the things I want to see are there - they are just hard to find.
Whether it's good for society is another question but, users definitely didn't show that they "wanted" a chronological feed, they only said it. There was a JUMP in engagement, not a decline.
Does an addict really want to be an addict? The Light Phone, screen time features, and various other things exist for a reason. People don’t want this, but feel helpless to break free from their addiction, which entered their life like a trojan horse.
what *some* users want.
sure, it may be have been a majority at the time. but imo chasing that was incredibly short sighted.
Facebook failed because there is no ethic associated with social media. You can continue to degrade the quality and nobody will say "hey stop, it's not supposed to be like that". FB bootstrapped by co-opting the instinctual value of social connection with your friends, which TikTok and IG also copied but with strangers instead of friends.
95% of people would not enjoy polite technical discussion forums, but the 5% that do are enough traffic for a site to survive.
> That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy
he has plans to start injecting "feed content" (eg shrimp jesus) into whatsapp group chats
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.
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 still see other content, even there, but it's still somehow manageable. I run out of updates very quickly though whereas I'd like to just start seeing older posts from friends that I've seen already.
For the numerous people who use Messenger or WhatsApp or other products this seems false and irrelevant.
edit: I decided to check real quick and I do have the friends tab. Here’s a crop of it, note I edited out the last “Menu” tab for privacy.
Tabs are: Home, Friends, Marketplace, Dating, Notifications, Menu.
It combines the economic model of web hosting (users pay to host spaces, reading is free, and writing in someone else's space is also free), the simple UI of social media (you have a profile and write posts), and the E2EE security model of 1Password (we actually implemented their published security model). It's also a non-profit so there's no pressure from owners to exploit users.
It's aimed primarily at parents of young kids who are annoyed at constantly sharing via text groups, but non-parents are also surprisingly into it.
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.
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...
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
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.
Every dealer probably knows better than to let people overdose on their first sniff. Especially if they're relapsing.
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
So, hello HN neighbor!
https://bsky.app/profile/fredgrott.bsky.social
join me on on bluesky
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.
Social sites used that power to publish their own stuff under the same protection.
That has broken the system. Social media sites are 100% responsible for all the misinformation, scams, and hate that they publish or promote. And they should be legally accountable for it.
"We are not accountable because the users are the ones posting the media"... but we post and promote whatever we want is a terrible way for the world to work.
I'm sure I could (indeed, I do) get pertinent updates from actual friends and family with <10 minutes of checking messages, voicemails, and emails per day. I wouldn't mind increasing that to 15 minutes if it meant I got a few less relevant but still interesting updates about their lives.
But that's way, way under the daily minutes spent by most people on TikTok. And if I wanted/my addiction demanded another hit of that "Oh, neat!" buzz when I'd just put my phone down 10 minutes ago, there's little chance that anyone in my small circle would have posted a single thing in the interval.
I don't spend nearly enough time in my group chats to justify Facebook's valuation. And there are no ads (yet, I'm sure they're working on it) in those chats.
Social Media has turned into an unhealthy addiction
Ads all the way, almost no posts from my network, and bunch of unmoderated, Onlyfans promoting reels. Thanks.
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.
Zuckerberg says social media is over... so why isn't his stock tanking? Meta is a social media company!
Tesla reports huge dips in sales, nothing... sure it's down since December, but it's still up year to year.
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.
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?
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 think any startup trying to solve this problem is going to have a really hard time because it will ultimately be external to the platforms where people already are, and user behavior has shown that they're inherently sticky to platforms. I wish it wasn't this way, because I think it'd be great for folks to be able to do this on their own.
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..
Life is so much better now.
The F.T.C. is not chasing an old problem. A case like this may serve as precedent.
There is a Peter Thiel tactic of Monopolies where you deny you are monopolizing a sector by defining your company as "in competition" with a much larger and hazy market. The example in Zero To One is Google disguising its online advertising market by comparing itself to the total global advertising market, both online and offline.
I see the same tactic here, where Facebook is trying to hide its user data monopoly [3] by situating itself to general news, lifestyle discovery, and general communications. However this is counter to the actual internal communications where Facebook would discuss buying or crushing competitors, like Snapchat [0] [1] [2], as a way to maintain their hegemony.
Don't be fooled by what Facebook says about itself. Concentrate on what it values.
[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/facebook-developers-help-us-destr...
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/facebook-secretl...
[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/copycat-how-facebook-tried-to-sq...
[3]: https://www.vox.com/business-and-finance/2018/12/6/18127980/...
What I get instead is a collection of small, resilient servers where the feed algorithm is FIFO, there's no advertising, and moderation is local.[0] It's my favorite parts of the old Internet before things got centralized and enshittificated.
I hope megasocial media is over. I doubt it, but a guy can wish. That doesn't mean all social media is dead.
[0]Mastodon doesn't have moderation. Individual servers do. That's the way it should be.
And honestly, I'm fine with it. Corporate media is a cesspool. It can all choke on its own fetid stench and die for all I care.
Just like RSS, I get exactly what I want.
when was the last time you were social on Facebook?
and maybe threads would count if it weren't 95% filled with bots and mentally ill weirdos pretending to know quantum physics (and how dare you judge them for doing so; whether or not they know quantum mechanics is like totally subjective and your frequency is clearly too low).
so either social is not dead or he killed it
What a unique way of saying algorithmically maximizing addiction to doomscrolling!
It's why the whole Meta thing exists - they wanted to be seen as a VR company who has a side hustle in social media to avoid being classified as a monopoly. That argument has failed so now he's asserting that social media doesn't matter.
- Ad promoting "investment" platform with deep fakes of personalities
- Ad from radicalized politician promoting hate speech
- Semi-naked girl promoting their "other" social media (OnlyFans)
- Ad disguised as content of some dude promoting a random restaurant
I agree with Zuckerberg, it's not social media anymore. I don't see content from any friend, only scams.
The more you consider this assertion, the more true it will appear.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery did a great deep dive into Facebook's Three Eras here (https://stratechery.com/2025/meta-v-ftc-the-three-facebook-e...). Essentially, Meta could afford to prioritize positive well-being when it had a monopoly on social media, but as soon as Tiktok came onto the scene and Meta started bleeding users to it, they had to respond. Now, everyone (Instagram, Youtube Shorts, Twitter, LinkedIn) is copying the model of vertical auto-scrolling short-form videos, because it's a battle for attention.
What _was_ Facebook supposed to do when it saw all of its users leave Instagram/Facebook for Tiktok? Not do anything? Though it's terrible that everything is now a short form addicting video platform, I understand the logic behind why the company did what they did (and why everyone is building this). People say they want real connection, but really, they just want to be entertained.
Maybe the reason people were leaving for TT is they were doing this kind of thing for years already https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719
“Race to the bottom of the brain stem”
Innovate.
It’s not necessary to turn your company into a toxic disaster to compete.
Further the success of Facebook was arguably the biggest contributor to startup culture ever - I would expect we'd have seen a fraction of the growth in VC if Facebook had never come to pass.
Groups, WhatsApp, etc, would be replaced overnight with, at least initially, a worse version. More hacking, probably worse moderation at scale, worse accessibility, etc.
Meta also gentrified East Palo Alto, and the Zuckerbergs now own a substantial amount of real estate in Redwood City and elsewhere. They've made a big footprint on the peninsula that deserves credit for the now $8 lattes in my hometown.
I disagree about the actual mechanism at play. It is a cart before the horse situation. Yes, it was driven by business, but that business was being driven by Web 2.0, which was being driven by the natural evolution of communication technology.
What are the selective pressures on the "natural evolution of communications technology?"
Why do companies want consumer engagement to start with?
In Web 1.0, you posted content and an audience came. In Web 2.0, you tried to open an empty field and commenters came and played with each other.
If anything, what happened next was a sort of halfway reversion, as the platforms tried to stratify and monetize two types of user. A subset who were the Web 2.0 contributors and another tier of more passive consumers. I think a lot of the "likes" stuff was also less about self-moderating channels and more about making passive users feel like they're engaging without actually having to contribute anything substantive.
You’re saying that Facebook was somehow helpless to avoid changing from a “friends feed” to an ad-maximizing outrage-inducing misinformation machine because of web2.0 communication technology?
Someone invented XmlHttpRequest and Facebook was like, “well that’s the ballgame, I guess we have to suck now?”
I agree that a Facebook had a powerful incentive to act this way. But they didn’t have to. The fact that they chose to reflects on their moral character.
Internal leaks let us know that Facebook has pretty advanced sentiment analysis internally. They knew that they were (are) making people miserable. They know that outrage causes engagement.
Other internal leaks let us know that Facebook was aware of how much disinformation was (is) being used on their platform to influence elections. To attack democracy.
They didn’t just look the other way, which would be reason enough to condemn them. They helped. When they saw how much money the propagandists were willing to pay, they built improved tools to better help them propagandize.
After the UK was shattered by the Brexit lies, when Facebook were called in front of parliament and congress to explain themselves over the Cambridge Analytica and related misinformation campaigns, they stalled, they lied, they played semantic word games to avoid admitting what is clearly stated in the leaked memos.
These were all choices. People should be held accountable for making awful choices.
Even if those choices result in them making a lot of money.
It sounds kind of crazy to even have to say that, doesn’t it? But that is where we are, partly because of arguments like yours from otherwise well-meaning people.
Don’t absolve them. Hold them accountable.
Zuckerberg wants to own the whole world and thinks you’re an idiot for trusting him. An egocentic sociopath who can’t imagine trusting anyone else because he knows what he will do when you give him your trust.
But it doesn't make it any less ridiculous. This is like the meme of the guy shooting the other dude in the chair.
I think on the How I Built This Instagram episode the Instagram founder said that Zuck was basically reading the data from Facebook's interactions and saw that the demographics and sharing tendencies of Facebook users meant that it was in a death spiral: people were moving interactions to private channels, reducing the available "friend" content. IMO, the causal factor here is that people became wary of public oversharing and the result was FB pivoting away from "social network" (OG Facebook) to "social media" (2010-2015 FB) and eventually just "media" (Instagram, Reels).
Looking back at what I posted on FB in 2008-2012 is like observing an alien from another planet: it was a completely different platform.
Over time, that network got stale and it included "people you sort of used to know", and then it included your grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of "things I want to share with all of those people", especially as I get older.
The privacy settings were carefully designed to have vague wording that how they worked on the surface wasn't how they really worked. Each and every one of them which had a different functionality than what the wording suggested on its surface resulted in you sharing to a much wider audience than you thought you were.
I recall carefully testing it out with a burner account which my main was not friends with, and it consistently taking 2-3 tries to get the privacy settings back to where I wanted them to be.
I would take those days over what Facebook is today - which is to say, useless. The only thing I use it for is groups, which have the good sense to only be about the thing you want to learn about when you look at the group. Still though - it is sad that FB Groups killed off small web forums.
Adding to that, the people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters. Political ranters, zero-commentary meme reposts, etc…
absolutely not, ... these were (and are) always there. instead it was Facebook management decisions choosing to amplify exactly this. Let's not blame a minority of (misguided) content creators for the shortcomings of Zuck and his sycophant senior managers.
That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.
The tapeworm lacks the faculties to care about the colon. It just needs nourishment. Same with Zuck. You can't blame the worm, because it's got no concept of reality beyond the things needed to serve its survival. Zuck, as a human, can only do that by very likely having a serious personality disorder.
It's like a tragedy of the commons, except there's only one party destroying all resources for themself
They never learn. GM, GE, RCA, you name it. They always want to make more money now now NOW. They don't understand they're taking on a metaphorical loan. They don't understand the interest they have to pay.
It's the ultimate greedy algorithm. Just make the decision that makes the most money right now, every time, over and over and over again. Don't look at anything else.
They are optimizing for short-medium term profits. The people there in the early days pull the ejection code when the “interest” is due. The company coasts until some private equity runs the numbers and realizes the parts are worth more than the whole.
This is capitalism. You are using “interest” (a finance term) seemingly in a moral / ethical critique. If so, use a moral / ethical term instead.
It's almost surreal, because it still feels like 2005 internet, but people will talk about current topics and the community is generally more engaging.
The moderation isn't some soulless ML model designed to optimize marketing revenue, it's a few dedicated people who want to make the community more fun and I've actually really enjoyed re-discovering the community there.
I guess I had simply forgotten about linear web forums as a concept. Places like Reddit (Hacker News, etc.) have a recursive reply model, which is nice in its own right, but there's something sort of captivating about everything being one long giant thread. It's more chaotic, it's less refined, but it's also kind of unpretentious.
[1] I already had one from when I'm a teenager but the name of that account will die with me as I posted too much on FYAD.
As soon as you have any platform which says "hey you there with an email address, you can put content on here that can be seen by anyone in the world." you will slowly end up with a scene that looks like all these sites we have now. Advertiser's and influencers will be there, at your behest or otherwise. There's only two options to avoid this. 1. Aggressively tune your algorithm against pure engagement and toward proximity. 2. Explicitly dissallow broad reach of content. And when I say aggressively I really mean it. If people can "follow" others unilaterally, even only showing "followed content" will still lead to most people seeing mostly high engagement posts, rather than their friends. At what point (degree of intervention) does something go from "natural" to "driven"? It's a hard question, but one things for sure, a Facebook that didn't allow high engagement content would already be dead.
I go to Facebook once a week or so, scroll for about a minute, then close it. It was a novel experience reconnecting with people from my past, but in the end, I just found out too much about people, realized it may be best to let people in your past stay there, and that comparison is truly the thief of joy.
Now, I just like watching interesting people talk about interesting things. I get that here, somewhat, reddit but lately only in a very narrow way, tik tok as long as I carefully maintain the algorithm, and youtube. All of them I have to be careful with, otherwise I can get pulled into hellholes of outrage bait. And I'm really, really wary of engaging in dicussions anymore. HN is about the only place, and even then I often regret it.
One time, on reddit, there was a discussion about dishwashers, and how people needed to clean food off dishes, otherwise it would fill up the filters. I posted a link to a user manual showing that it was common to hook up the dishwasher to the garbage disposal to take care of that. I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
Even here, half the time I post, I feel I will end up regretting it.
Lately, I've found that another mental model fits that sort of medium even better:
Hot takes scrawled on the bathroom walls of pubs.
> I was downvoted into deep negatives, and I think one or more negative replies for just posting something simple and factual.
One of the darker side-effects of social media is that everything now feels very ideological and "team sports." You're either "with us" or "against us," nuance has basically been obliterated. Even more shocking is that in some places, it seems like anything that's truthful/factual or plausibly truthful triggers a visceral negative reaction in people (to the point where, what used to be polite disagreement is now a rage-dump).
When social media started out, it was simply a feed of what you followed. FB, Twitter, Reddit, everything — they showed you a chronological list of everything that the people/groups you followed posted.
It was glorious.
But it wasn’t making money. These platforms were all funded by investors in hopes that they would someday make money.
And now they are — through ads and sponsored content that no one asked for or wants, via algorithms designed for one thing: profit.
It’s zero surprise to me that social media platforms have become the garbage that they are now.
I’ve moved on from all but a couple platforms (HN, Board Game Geek, and Bogleheads — arguably not social media platforms in the same vein as the others mentioned, because they aren’t trying to monetize, except BGG which monetizes via traditional banner ads, which I’ll take 10/10 over “content ads”).
But I have zero interest in returning to anything that injects their sponsored content in the middle of feeds.
If social media platforms can’t figure out a way to monetize without injecting this garbage, I’ll stick to these others.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/meta/655835/meta-layoffs-reality-la...
Facebook, and Instagram, is a frustrating, infuriating, alarming experience that really does not "bring joy" to my life.
Get to know girls at Harvard!
---
Get to know girls at select universities!
---
Get to know anyone we've invited! We're so popular, we've got profiles of people at every major university! Write them messages, organize parties, etc! Upload pictures of parties or anything interesting!
---
And now you can play addicting games on Facebook!
---
And you can make a profile if you don't have a school!
And be fed ads and clickbait!
---
while we quietly dump-sell all your info to anyone!
---
Now meet 20% more criminals and scammers! Sell your car on our marketplace! You'll regret every message!
---
Now with international crime!
---
Now with more bots than humans!
---
Why is everyone not respecting us? Oh, its over!
Commercial social media on the other hand may well be dying.
Meta intentionally drives this and don't forget that it's helped by millions of influencers that learned how to maximize engagement.
A good-faith Facebook with exclusively a friends-only timeline might generate 20% of the current ad revenue. And it won't matter much because the bad-faith competitor will do the dopamine approach and users will be attracted to it like flies.
I have kept my FB account open just to contact some members of the family that live far away. Or to check someone I know in my circle that I haven't heard from a while.
But scrolling? Nah. I don't have the app and only open it once a month.
There's a word for it: enshitification. Blame yourself for making it a crap experience, Mark.
ColinWright•13h ago
"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.
vseplet•12h ago
d13z•12h ago
troupo•10h ago
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.
CharlieDigital•10h ago
The only things I _want_ to see are my family and friends, but Zuck keeps shoving softcore porn into my feed.
mnky9800n•10h ago
CharlieDigital•10h ago
grugagag•10h ago
tboyd47•5h ago
chrisco255•10h ago
martin_a•10h ago
netsharc•10h ago
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.
martin_a•8h ago
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.
ceejayoz•7h ago
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.
vlachen•8h ago
www.instagram.com##article:has-text(Suggested for you):style(visibility: hidden !important; height: 300px !important; overflow: hidden !important)
Pxtl•7h ago
IE: Don't let your eyes linger on eyecandy on Meta's platforms or they will feed you a firehose of horny slop.
cg5280•7h ago
kodt•7h ago
simion314•5h ago
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
mrweasel•6h ago
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.
iamcalledrob•10h ago
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.
idle_zealot•10h ago
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.
rightbyte•10h ago
GuB-42•9h ago
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...
FinnLobsien•9h ago
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.
nottorp•9h ago
Only that it's portable.
If we didn't have "social media" we'd be all watching samey tv series on our phones.
FinnLobsien•6h ago
I’d also argue that the average TV show is more edifying than the average social media post but that’s another topic.
nottorp•5h ago
Nope. In my experience most modern series can be remade as 1 hour movies ... per season.
zanellato19•7h ago
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.
FinnLobsien•6h ago
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.
georgeecollins•3h ago