Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/<p>I've tried to type out several pithy comments, but the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.<p>Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac, but it's not on the menu anymore because Taco Bell had a few really good quarters, so McDonald's decided to pivot to tacos. Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted.<p>Edit: To clarify, this example is contrived and the details are not the point. The point is that Facebook offered something to their users, spent years and billions of dollars making sure that as many people as possible got it from Facebook, and then decided to just yank the rug out from under all those people to chase the fairy tale of endless growth.
It’s crazy to think the social media era may finally be ending. There’s really no viable platform anymore where you can just go passively keep up with what friends and acquaintances are doing. Everything is about feeding you content you didn’t ask for but may be targeted enough to catch your attention.<p>And for what? To show you some ads here and there? To collect data that can be used to… sell more ads and products?<p>Instagram was once my favorite app. There was a golden age before stories came a long where people just posted random pictures of what they were up to or what they were seeing. Things weren’t too memefied or political, unlike Facebook. Then photos got more and more glamorized and more about flexing and showing how much cooler and more awesome your life was. People started following themes and niches for their profile content rather than just posting random unorganized series of photos. Businesses and brands started getting built on the platform.<p>Building an Instagram clone the way it used to be is fairly trivial these days. I could probably throw one together in a few months, but growing its popularity is practically impossible these days with such entrenched incumbents and no niches left to start a user base with.<p>…unless perhaps… we build a social network on the blockchain
I know it sounds dumb but its hard to say we haven't moved closer to what only ~10 years ago we considered a "playful exaggeration" on the worst of humans and social media.<p>In WallE, everyone is floating around in chairs having their content spoon-fed to them with a generous amount of ads mixed in. If you've ever scrolled or seen someone scroll, its kinda close. Just mindlessly moving their thumb up and down, taking in content that will be forgotten within minutes. Ask a tik tok user to tell you even 10% of the videos they saw within the last hour. I'd be surprised if they could.<p>I hope its not too "old man yelling at cloud" because I do my 15 minutes of mindless instagram scrolling but I have a timer that locks the app and I usually only need 15 minutes, more just feels bleh. Some of my family/friends "brag" about having 7+ hrs of "tik tok time" on their iphone stats. Just crazy.
I feel like half the comments here about "facebook dying" and how "facebook can't compete with tiktok" are missing the big picture about facebook.<p>For a lot of people, facebook basically <i>is</i> the internet. The same way AOL was a long time ago. Everyone they want to talk to as they go about their day is there. Basically every business in the US that bothers with an online presence at all either has a facebook page or <i>exclusively</i> has a facebook page. Craigslist is being eaten by facebook marketplace. Even Facebook messenger is still a wildly successful chat app and it's like... their 3rd or 4th-place messaging platform.<p>Facebook has become a sort of digital town square that is a pretty significant part of the economy; the real-world brick-and-mortar economy. Tiktok and instagram are much more recreational.
This actually makes me pretty sad. For all of Facebook's ills, it did at least do a good job of keeping me connected with friends before it got weird. Same with Instagram. Twitter is fantastic because it helps me discover new people, new interests, new worlds, in a way.<p>TikTok doesn't feel social at all. It feels entirely too performative. Everything on there is a performance. Everything is an act. Everything is simply an effort of some kind or another. Sounds more exhausting than fun.<p>Really wish there was a thriving ecosystem of small online communities that had some sort of financial structure that could collectively create as much money as these larger companies do.<p>Instead, well, here we are.
All the platforms have their own TikTok style mechanism now. YouTube has Shorts, Facebook has its Reels feature which is tightly integrated with Instagram and you need an Instagram account to engage with Reels on Facebook, which is a bit of a growth hacker dark pattern. For now, Reels is not interspersed with ADs which is refreshing, but that could all change.<p>The whole vertical video craze is a weird one, and one I’ve only recently tried to adjust to. I mean the pace of it is so fast, and I barely have time to process each video before moving to the next one. A whole generation are going to be raised on cheap dopamine hits and will probably suffer mild ADD symptoms because of this.<p>I want the slow web back where I can chew on long form content and mull over large pieces of text and long winded podcasts, not boiled down snippets of info that prey on my base instincts and giddy 1 minute dopamine fixes.
> TikTok-style "discovery engine" model shares many of the same problems.<p>> - Posts are even less rooted in a web of social relationship.<p>> - The larger the crowd, the louder the threshold for speech to be heard.<p>This is prescient. The "social media" of today is more like Napster than it is like the the early-2000s Facebook:<p>* People look for content that they want (political rage, softcore pornography, funny videos), with little concern for who it comes from.<p>* Content is exchanged between peers, but centrally indexed and mediated.<p>* While the network is ostensibly peer-to-peer, the content exchanged on it is filtered by the central entity according to any policy they see fit.
So this is my own conspiracy rabbit hole…<p>I get the impression all of these sites that use quick 10-15 second video clips followed by screenshots of a tweet or quote are a dystopian method of controlling human behavior.<p>It seems like a way to implant a thought or feeling and minimize critical thinking.<p>In the past social media sites reddit / facebook had great comment sections and links to actual articles. Although this still exists (to some extent and on niche subreddits for example) it seems to be rapidly changing to screenshot of a tweet, or quote or a short video clip. Followed by one line responses or even just a single emoji.<p>For example you will see a quote from politician x … as a screenshot …. ughh that makes me so mad!!! But little context is provided about the quote, when it was said, was it actually said and is the the expanded text available to help understand.<p>Nope it’s .. just a quick emotion that makes me mad!!… followed by scroll to cat video #532<p>Watching people sitting at parks, waiting for a bus, waiting at a restaurant … lots of the same … scroll scroll … giggle giggle… go political team A they are saving world … ugghh political team B is so bad and makes me mad they hate everyone … scroll .. scrolll .. did you know if you eat Kale you live forever … scroll … scroll<p>Just something really off putting about this experience IMO. Seems very shallow / minimal thinking …
Facebook hasn't actually showed me a timeline of what my family and friends have posted in YEARS.<p>I stopped using FB years ago because of this. I've also stopped using instagram on the last couple of years for the same reason. I'm constantly being shown recommended posts from either random people or ads rather than a basic linear timeline of people I actually give a fuck about.<p>FB can go die in a fire.
> Facebook and its rivals call this a "discovery engine" because it reliably spits out recommendations of posts from everywhere that might hold your attention.<p>All I can think about is how every big social media company continues to invent persuasive technology to keep everyone glued to their devices and steal away our most precious asset in our lives; our attention.<p>Where your attention goes, your life goes. I'm only 30 and much of my 20s went to these platforms. I can't say for the better. I think we all need to be bored again and not have a constant IV drip of dopamine in our hands at all times.<p><a href="https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology" rel="nofollow">https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasive_technology</a>
I'll admit that I deleted my Facebook account years ago, and thus haven't seen what this redesign looks like, but this sounds like a baffling move. Facebook has been less and less popular with the younger crowd; and is now mainly associated as a place for older generations, who like use it primarily as a way to keep track of friends and family and secondarily as a way to see the news. I can't see the "Tiktok-ification" of their platform as being successful at all. My grandmother wants to see pictures of their neighbor's holidays, not scroll through the antics of kids she doesn't know. Again, the article doesn't give any screenshots, but expanding the feed pool to encompass the whole world is the exact opposite of why people are still sticking around.
"TikTok and Facebook's antics (existence?) have me seriously considering quitting tech. I feel like no matter what I do, I am feeding one of these societal cancers by implementing tracking for whoever is paying me currently, lifting dark patterns, etc, using the API of Google... I tried to avoid doing these things for awhile but nobody pays me to be ethical.<p>My only marketable skill is software development and I pretty much hate what it has become. 16 years down the drain."<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233969" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233969</a><p>I remember being disappointed that an early iPhone I bought came with some Facebook preset/integration pre-installed.
It's sad how they aren't instead capitalizing on their niche and going back to their roots, instead choosing to go against TikTok which is probably a futile endeavour because they already grabbed and established that culture.<p>If I've learnt one thing from social networks, it's that competitors only rarely succeed in capturing another network's niche. Instagram has tried to become TikTok too but few would say the Reels concept is a smashing success... Facebook has tried to be Snapchat as well with ephemereal messaging, but few would say Facebook is known for that and recapturing the youth culture today. Meanwhile, Snapchat still thrives at a more rapid rate than Twitter and Facebook. You can not simply copy features and then the culture will come.<p>And when Google+ was rising, Facebook desperately tried to introduce more ways to handle your friend lists due to the innovative "circles" of Google+. These features still remain but few today are aware that Facebook posts to Friends aren't seen by friends in your Acquaintances friend list because those are there to only see Public posts... This is an example of a relic from those days but there are other examples too.<p>Despite the confidence you would expect them to have from having more than a billion users, they are surprisingly unsure of themselves and who they want to be. You can also see it happen with Meta and VR. Is that supposed to now work in tandem with the TikTokification (how? a clip feed is hardly interactive?), or are they still just confused about who they want to be? I wonder how much of it has to do with Zuckerberg himself?
Several years ago I saw an ad on Tumblr (I know, I know), for a strange meme site. After seeing several hundred of these ads, I got curious about how it could be profitable to run such nonsense and clicked. Content that was just funny enough to keep me scrolling mixed with ads. It turned out, that was a site run by an Israeli ad-tech media company that used algorithms to find out how many ads they could could put in while maintaining attention, a sort of google ads style auction running on the page to determine if it should add an ad or a meme to the page next.<p>Linkedin has public research doing the same type of thing.
I always thought Facebook sat at a very awkward, uncanny-valley type position on the social media spectrum. On the one hand it doesn't feel (or is) private or personal. The feed mechanic doesn't really make for great conversations and everything is half public, the line between friends and other people isn't that clear, and so on.<p>Chat platforms like Telegram/Discord/Whatsapp and TikTok clearly lean into one direction (albeit on opposite ends of the spectrum). TikTok tends to be a mile wide and an inch deep but at least it leverages what the internet is good at, and chat apps do the reverse.<p>I think that bifurcation is just happening in general, not just on social media apps. There's more interest in private spaces as well as mass popular culture but the middle-ground isn't that appealing any more.
I recently download the Facebook app to sell something in the marketplace. It has become so bloated and un-user friendly, I question why anyone would use it on a daily basis. The new feeds is a bunch of irrelevant posts I don’t care about. I guess it was bound to happen when you hire thousands of workers to work on one app. It’s been optimized into a deformed monster.
Went to facebook for the first time in months to check this out. Clicked the little TV icon and waited for 20 seconds on a blank page before some worthless smut loaded. I don’t see this going well for facebook.
Somewhat unrelated, but the other day I was trying to see which of my friends still live in the city I used to live in, as I was about to visit.<p>I could not find a way to filter friends by current city. Seems like such an obvious feature meant for a side supposedly about connecting you with friends. Guess it wouldn’t move the right KPIs.
I like to go against the current on these topics, try to bring a different perspective even if I don’t fully agree with what I’m saying:<p>I think the TikTok threat to Meta is overblown. They’re a one trick pony and their trick is the unhealthiest of them all, presenting the user with the least amount of control and provided by the most opaque, state controlled, spyware-esque organisation.<p>You thought Russia using Facebook for political interference was bad? The CCP is hardwired into TikTok for fucks sakes!<p>I think Facebook has a longer runway. They will keep milking insta and will prob start doing a better job of monetising Whatsapp.<p>Also, I think the Occulus is actually pretty great, especially for the price. I can envision a “dumber” version, lighter and with more battery life but 5G dependent for the compute requirements being a thing for external use.<p>Once a company gets VR done well the smartphone is OVER.
Can someone please explain to me why Facebook shouldn’t be treated as a news publisher? They are now outright choosing what content to show you. This is indistinguishable from opinion or freelance journalism sites.<p>Facebook is now explicitly deciding which content to allow, editorializing content at will, and dictating the content that you see.<p>Looks like a news publisher. Sounds like a news publisher. Acts like a news publisher.<p>Facebook should not receive Section 230 protections any longer.
It's very difficult to get much engagement on Facebook anymore without boosting your post artificially by paying. I remember being able to just post some random article or status to my timeline and friends would chime in and give their opinions or share jokes...can't really do that anymore, at least not consistently. Now I mostly just use Facebook for chat and news. Tiktok is fun, but I don't understand why it needs to be replicated. There is plenty of room for multiple avenues on how to engage with people, or your friends, etc.<p>It's not just Facebook either, Twitter is also becoming harder and harder to get good engagment on unless you're already a big account. It wasn't always like that.
Am I the only one who found the article's formatting confusing and unnecessary? The bullet points don't seem to be used for lists, and it isn't clear to me why many words are bold... can someone educate me on this formatting?
This Axios „article“ is the written version of a TikTok session, in an ironic turn of events. The bite sized information and the excessive use of bullet points is designed to keep readers engaged in a world driven by ultra short attention spans. I bemoan the lack of a well researched, deep article around this latest pivot of Facebook.
Here is Adam Mosseri, "Head of Instagram at Instagram", talking about why Instagram is leaning into Reels videos:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1551890839584088065" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/mosseri/status/1551890839584088065</a><p>He says users are using Reels more, even though they say they don't want Reels. Replies say content creators are reluctantly making Reels because the algorithm favors Reels over regular posts. Ironically, he posted this on Twitter (as a video) because it's a better medium for reaching Instagram users?
Back around 2009 when Facebook was first becoming ascendant, people wondered if social networks were generational. I.e., would each younger generation be willing to use the same social network as their parents?<p>I think the de facto surrender of Facebook to TikTok here is evidence that social networks ARE generational. That implies that TikTok may reign supreme for about 20 years, but thereabouts, they'll have to contend with yet another rising challenger.
What's going on with Facebook product management? It's shocking to see core products deteriorate, others barely every improve (where's instagram and whatsapp for iPad?), while competitors (these days tiktok, before Snap) are merely imitated years later.<p>Actually kind of sad to see considering I'm a big fan of Social and 'Meta' has been on the forefront for years. I hope they find a way to rethink this.
I don't miss it being run by google or forced into every product, but google+ circles were so much better then facebook friend lists.<p>But I refuse to be nostalgic for FB, it's always been meh to me.<p>And the sad thing with all these changes is it's going to frustrate all the old retirees who just want their computer to do the same thing that it used to do.
If you look at the recent Facebook news in concert - "turning up the heat" on employees, Oculus price increase, and copying TikTok as quickly as possible - it seems like Facebook is in real trouble. This is the flailing of a drowning man.
I am very surprised that there are nearly 500 comments on this item and none mentioned VR. VR is the uncharted territory of social media. Facebook has a head-start but TikTok is also investing billions and will catch up. Just as desktops are legacy, soon smartphones will be too.<p>I also saw no comments about this "Facebook will continue to provide old-school friends-and-family networking via a subsidiary tab. Those posts will be chronologically ordered, as some users have long wished for."<p>One final point is political ads being big business at FB. So it'll be interesting how are their numbers in the 4th quarter.
I stopped using this years ago, except I still have an account and minorly check once a week or month depending on my mood. I'll give the same refrain I expect from most: how do I keep up with goings-on of long-lost friends, family members with whom I don't want to directly interact but want to know what they're "up to" and to know about major life events? Maybe the answer is that I should delete facebook and go back to beforetimes when the world was smaller and I only interacted with people in my immediate geographic area except at decennial family reunions.
Facebook will die with what is currently the older generation. They're addicted, and while they're still around, Facebook will survive. Nobody else seems to care so much about Facebook anymore.
Previously: "The end of Facebook" (2011), <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660680" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660680</a>
The hacks I've done to make facebook kind of useful<p>- Turn on every privacy setting they have available and "serve me up generic ads only"<p>- Unfollow EVERTYTHING and EVERYONE, cut your friends list down too, or click on the "follow" only of your real most frequent friends of concern except your core groups of interest, pare it down to less than 20-30, and more so if your groups are active.<p>- Turn off active status except for your top 10 friends/family and treat messenger like email otherwise (I do the same with do not disturb mode on iphone)<p>- Use the "Most Recent" button on the left and make it a habit so you don't see the same posts over and over.<p>It become a lot more useful of a tool after that. Everyone whines but like a lot of things for it to be useful you have to put in a little bit of time and trim your hedges instead of letting them grow into amorphous blobs. or delete it, there's not much in between. Also I hate hate hate tiktok and this whole video thing, I don't think they bring very much more useful info to the social media conversation.
To me it seems that all social media platforms converge to some user hostile version of Reddit. You can argue that it got worse over time too, but it still is the platform that gives me most control over what I like to see.<p>The other model that seems to work well for users are obviously platforms like Signal/Matrix/Whatsapp.
It is strange that it is so difficult to be social on a platform that is supposedly "social media". For example, I cannot just follow my friends' feed like I want, the comment editor is often unusable on mobile phone. I cannot send messages to others without installing the app, etc.<p>Social media facilitates the forming of grassroots movements and this challenges the existing power structures. What Facebook does is curiously well aligned with preventing people from forming grassroots movements.<p>It does not require a conspiracy for this to happen. It may just be that FB gets pressure from some governments to set up policies that effectively curb down grassroots movements, and if it does not comply, it would get pushed out.
IMO this is the normal lifecycle of any social media. I would even argue that advertising just a part of it.<p>Kids think its cool and use it -> Slightly older generation enters because its cool with the kids -> even older generation enters -> now its cringe for the kids -> they find something else.<p>Add on top the fact that the business model incentive is to push as many ads as possible and any medium is transformed from an exclusive sharing space to a public square with your awkward aunt and a million ads.<p>TikTok is not escaping this. Its still early and people share a lot of intimate things on there (and they are proud that they can do it), but that will quickly change as it becomes more mainstream.
I hate to say this but Google, particularly YouTube, has the best "discovery engine" in my experience. I'm a fan of long-form content so that must be the primary reason why I prefer it over other platforms.
I really miss the experience I had with MySpace back in 2004-2007. It gave users a lot of control over their personal pages, and I had a lot of fun adding all sorts of wacky things. I got to communicate with some of my favorite bands and authors, all the content in someone's profile was contained in a single place. There was almost a diy feel to it. I sometimes even feel nostalgic about the "Top 8" drama. It was a simpler time. I was also young so I probably overlooked the darker side of things then. People did warn a lot about putting your real name online because it might give murderers your information, granted there were fewer people on the internet then and it had a certain wild west vibe to it, the great unknown with associated fears- somewhere along the way society did a 180 and everyone started putting all their information online. It's really strange to think about the shifts, but even stranger to think about the sources of the moving parts bringing the changes.<p>There are alternatives to corporate-run social media (the Fediverse, to name one off the top of my head) that are less-known. I've personally just left social media altogether. I had a period of time I spent in cycles of addiction/absrinence and I have to say I much prefer to keep in touch with people on more personal direct contact (snail mail, e-mail, messaging) without meddling, extra baggage, advertisers, my data being sold off to unknown entities to do as they please according to their most likely not benign motivations. But the biggest factor in my exit from social media was how negative it all became.<p>I joined facebook in 2007 when you needed to be invited in and it was basically mostly students. Ober the years things went from "so neat I can connect to people all over the world" to an online battleground in the span of a decade (arguably 2 decades, depending on your online experience). The convenience of keeping in touch with relatives/friends overseas and the wonderment of making friends online has become eclipsed by all the other things which have nothing to do with people being able to connect. If anything these big platforms have become all about (directly, indirectly, incidentally, regardless) gaming the divisions between people to push them apart and foment rifts they can profit from, at least that's how I see it and I am just done with all that.
The "discovery" setups of increasingly all social media platforms is a big turn off for my use case of actually being social with my friends when we are away from each other.<p>In instagram the only redeeming feature left is the "story" buttons at the top. I stopped using Facebook long ago, though I still use messenger.<p>I also use Slack and WhatsApp to communicate, basically SMS texting but in groups.<p>Whatever the "social" platforms now are, they are very off putting to say the least. Maybe good for killing time writing for the bus? A reversion back to cute cat and dog videos.
I hope my child does not fall into the tiktok future. How can I fight against it? I don't use such app but I'm sure it's popular for younger people especially teenagers.
Looks like the only platform that hasn't switched to tiktok style is Twitter,because all the other are owned by Facebook.<p>Oh also Snapchat.<p>I'm still waiting for the tiktok redesign for WhatsApp lol
FB/Meta still has phenomenal value, just the FB app is being sunset.
The Whatsapp acquisition, fb friends list and all those photos you have uploaded will be worth so much in time to come.<p>Where FB wins is it owns the best connections. Who cares what the app shows you, FB actually knows more about who you care about. When that comes to the metaverse that will be like owning the yellowpages and always brings added value.<p>FB App is dead. Meta is still winning.
The same problem has destroyed instagram.
I closed my Facebook account years ago, pre COVID, but still enjoyed instagram.<p>In the last six months, a steady rot has crept into instagram. I hardly see any of my friend's photos anymore. Just reel after reel after reel from people I have never heard of. I wish they had a settings button to block all reels, but they don't.<p>So, that is the end of instagram for me.<p>Meta sucks.
Does this mean Facebook’s privacy model is going to change radically? [1] TikTok’s “for you” feed works because all posts are globally-visible, but on Facebook isn’t sharing generally limited to your social network? Will they change things so that every Facebook post is globally visible by default?<p>[1] Or maybe it changed already. I haven’t used Facebook in a long time.
FWIW, I deleted my Facebook account years ago and never looked back. I’m not on Twitter, TikTok, instagram, or Snapchat. I only maintain presence on LinkedIn due to work (staying in touch with clients), painful as it it. Perhaps there is white space for a new generation of social networks, which are not privacy hoarding ad machines?
> The dominant player in social media is transforming itself into a kind of digital mass media, in which the reactions of hordes of anonymous users, processed by machine learning, drive the selection of your content.<p>It's becoming more and more evident that this whole thing is one giant intelligence bootstrapping simulation.
FB stock returned near IPO price (2017, 150$).<p>Investors believed for 5 years to the "growth first, profit later" theory. But now, another competitor (TikTok) is stealing their market share and profits for FB will never arrive.<p>This is also a confirmation that not always focusing on growth will give you confidence on market share.
Havent used Facebook in ages, so cant say what they have become. But one of the primary reasons why i left FB was because it had become junk, and was of no value.<p>Will i go back and use it because it has a new design. probably not, as i believe FB's core approach has not changed
What’s up with the format and writing style of this article? Bulleted lists are used to make points rather than list things, and the first few words of some paragraphs are bolded. Is this a new style of writing that their algorithm shows them is effective?
No sunset, just two different kind of products that coesists. Social networking still strong but shifted to direct messaging app like whatsapp or telegram. The difficult for meta is structure Instagram to keep this two kind of products together.
I belive this is the future of “social media” short snippets of video that does not require a attention span greater then that of a goldfish. Facebook will follow tiktok example, since it seems like that is what people wants to see
I'm curious if this decision was made to be ready for an eventual TikTok ban? The drums have been beating on that for a while. FB might know this is coming and wants to slurp up the displaced users when it happens.
Only a Mark kinda guy would invest in building a whole new ecosystem to try and win in it just because he didn't come up with the fact that video is much more catchy than your grandma's motivational pics.
Spending a few minutes coming back to FB after this article, the chronological feed and news feed seem pretty similar in terms of content. Maybe that's just who I'm friends with though.
I wanted to read this out of sincere curiosity but it put a big popup covering everything that I couldn’t dismiss or even agree to. So welp so much for the content, good luck with all your fish.
building an open, white-label, embeddable Instagram/Tiktok as SAAS solution at alvin5.com. The idea is that communities and individuals can create their own Instagram like social media app/feed (Shopify for Social media), would love to meet with interested parties.
Did Facebook ever really need to become such a behemoth? Could they not have been mildly profitable just hosting pictures and helping people stay connected? Would it have been impossible for them to simply keep operating without capitalism's Blob-like need for growth at all costs?
> Mark last week as the end of ..<p>What a unique garden-path sentence.[0] I had to re-read that a couple times since I thought it was referring to Mark Zuckerberg given the title of the article..<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence</a>