Like a large room full of people talking until an event starts, and that moment when half the crowd has realized that someone has gone on stage while the other half has gotten sucked into an argument/discussion and forgotten why we were all here in the first place.

>> people who kept posting as if nothing changed typically were extremely low-value posters

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.

A reference to Larry Ellison as a lawnmower, perhaps? [0]

> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15886728

> That's like saying a tapeworm is humble because it doesn't care which colon it's sitting in.

A more VC speak of this is

"Strong ideas loosely held"

> 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.

Isn't that behavior massively rewarded in the current system of VC-driven capitalism as a general rule? Such founders/companies leach off the society, leave it worse and are given huge valuations and riches. Infact the incentives mean we will see more of such people rise to the top in a ever-worsening feedback cycle until the society puts some checks on them. Which is a extra difficult in this deliberately fragmented environment. Same old loop we can't break out of.

That was intentional. I recall testing this out every time there was a new "oops, we're sorry, we reset your privacy settings to default -- AGAIN".

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.

Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to the people that you knew.

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.

You might manage the same if you’re rich enough to hire top-tier advisors. Let’s not kid ourselves—OG Facebook wasn’t a tech marvel or even particularly original. It just landed in the right place at the right time and snowballed from there.

In recent years, operating it successfully despite burning through billions for their metaverse boondoggle, sure

Maybe he’s just good at not rocking the boat too much? I’m fairly certain these things mostly keep moving without any input.

I always see comments like this, but I rarely have this problem myself, though I see it on others' accounts. Even my Facebook feed shows me lots of legitimately useful posts. Sure, updates from friends and family are a much lower fraction than they were, but I'm actually OK with what I see.

Time to dust off my Fark account.

Yeah, and the simple $10 one-time-fee actually is surprisingly effective at filtering out spam bots and people who post crap content. People don't just make an account in thirty seconds and create a bunch of spam until they're banned, or at least they don't do that much because it would get relatively expensive fairly quickly.

It goes all the way back to Usenet, if not earlier.

When did Usenet really fail? I left by 2007 but it was in bad shape before that.

I agree. It also means you likely need some way of sorting replies. And that means upvoting, which is a horrid system.

They know, it's just that most of the people will be gone before the negative effects become apparent. Most senior people are only going to be around for 7.2 years so if they optimize for short/medium term benefits and cash out, the long term consequences won't affect them.

What makes you think “they don’t understand the interest they have to pay”?

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 really about interest rates. Higher interest rates means more immediate revenue needed.

Social media was fueled by a decade of low interest.

They need not learn, they do as they’re primed, to go for profit, squeeze and profit, profit and profit some more. Then profit even from the dead husk on the way out. That’s the hyper capitalist lifecycle of a business product.

All those photos and videos cost bandwidth, and that ain't free.

But the number of people willing to pay for their accounts on this stuff is vanishingly small.

So either you run this as a side project and accept that it's losing money, or you start running ads. And the moment you start running ads is the moment your most profitable choice becomes slowly turning your site more and more addictive, so that people spend more and more time on it and see more and more ads.

(Or you can keep the place small and constrained to people who have a high chance of being able to kick some money in for the bills, I'm only paying about half my Mastodon instance's fees because of making this choice.)

Or you can create a huge societal shift where we decide that having non-profit social sites is a good thing, and that they should be funded by the state, even if many of the views on them contradict the views of the giant bags of money pretending to be humans who are currently in control of the country. Ideally this societal shift would make it much harder for these giant bags of money to exist, as well.

Oh also getting people to stick around on a site that's not built to be addictive is surprisingly hard.

I'm still using Facebook for this, which works for the very few of my friends who are on it. It's actually nice if you aggressively report and unfollow everything you don't want to see.

Does anybody here know of an alternative that works like 2010 Facebook?

At this point, why would you trust anything? I certainly don't. Any platform that exists could get bought up by another company that just uses all the content to train AI.

It can. The problem is getting users there, and it being built by someone who isn't interested in swallowing the world.

Remarkably, despite caring about this kind of thing, I had never heard of FB Purity until today!

I am paranoid enough to wonder if I should be suspicious, but I am hopeful enough to wonder what other amazing stuff is out there to learn about.

And metrics and growth was driven by the new ability to make discussions out of posted content (i.e. Web 2.0)

Consumers willing to engage in any specific tech, enough to trigger network effects.

Much like a shot of heroin, yes, this is the take. Facebook got a taste of Web 2.0 and couldn't use it recreationally. It became their entire life. They immediately integrated it into every part of business until it was the only thing that mattered.

> This is very evident in the AAA games industry, which is facing a 10x downturn in funding, abysmally bad (negative) ROI, and exhausted growth engines because it shaped itself around what players would consume for years, ignoring what they actually wanted. And the players got tired[0].

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.

Right, and the things preventing restaurants from doing this:

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.

> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

One difference that may possibly affect the strength of your argument is that fentanyl is a physically addictive drug. Social media may be "addictive" but they aren't addictive. If you genuinely believe they're equivalent, use social media for a year, and fentanyl for a year, and see which is easier to quit.

Actually, scratch that: make it a thought experiment. But if you can see that they aren't equivalent, you can see that it's not a good comparison.

> With this approach, everybody wants fentanyl.

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.

What do you think Starbucks is?

Sure there are nice small restaurants. But look at all the big chains.

You just described Starbucks

It started as small roaster of coffee but now it’s a Sugar+Caffeine drink system for addicts.

Or users eventually get used to it until one day they wake up and realize that the thing they went there for isn't what they get.

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.

It's just how you define "want." They a-b tested the algo vs chronological feed and the algo one because more people used it. It's just stated vs revealed preference. As a business, who's goal is to make money, does something that makes them more money, are they supposed to stop?

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.

You're describing the cozy web. The Eternal September problem is actually solved right now it's just semi-invite-only.

I am a part of more genuine social networks now then when facebook launched. They're all around you, it's just "giant supermassive public square" never really worked even with strong recommendation algorithms to try to ad-hoc connect related people and cut down on the perceived size.

Most of them live on Discord, others on the fediverse, none are large by any metric and highly personal.

Facebook has simply been climbing towards a local maxima that is poorly correlated with what people need to connect. They rely on mountains of data for their optimization but their reward function is just off.

There already is a reasonable alternative for connecting with the people you know. Group chats.

Your implication is correct in that there is no reasonable alternative for distracting oneself. At the same time, I'm not sure that if you were to build an alternative, it would not degrade into "content" scrolling as well.

People want slop, they always wanted slop and there is no magical mind controlling powers in a Facebook feed. It was the case in the age of TV, magazines and when nobody had any idea how to even measure what people want.

If Mark Zuckerberg forcibly injected educational material and long form journalism into everyone's feed the average user would uninstall the app. People have been consuming crap since they were able to draw boobs on cave walls with chalk. Do you know why every belief system that claims people are ensnared by some false consciousness fails? Because they aren't, there's no such thing. Mark Zuckerberg is exactly right about one thing, he gave the people what they wanted, and if he's going to lose to a platform like TikTok it's because they're even better at it

What they do. There are long-term goals and short-term goals (convenience etc.) Society pressures you into having long-term goals even if you don't do anything about them.

>No one "wants" to be addicted

Not consciously, no. But our conscious mind is just the tip of the iceberg, half-filled with post-hoc rationalizations for numerous unconscious urges. We don't have to call them "wants", but maybe "desires" works better.

Are they? I know that many of us have got off. The question is are we minor outliers or a wave? I don't know.

Probably because it looks so boring and dry that anyone motivated by blinking lights and fast cuts is immediately turned away.

The prospect of having to read is a large turnoff for many people.

This is very true, and pairs well with the other comment about netiquette.

95% of people would not enjoy polite technical discussion forums, but the 5% that do are enough traffic for a site to survive.

That was parent comment:

> That's like a restaurant replacing all their food with candy

Numbers must go up. In the stock market anything steady state is dead.

I really appreciate the reply, thanks for sharing that.

> Every time all the usage metrics tanked.

What if that's exactly what people want? Less usage of Facebook (horrifying, I know -- it can't be true, right?), with a focus on friends etc. when they do use it? I know you'll dislike the analogy, but isn't all that different from smoking. You think usage metrics tanking implies the outcome is bad... why exactly? Is it that unthinkable that less quantity and more quality is better for people, and what they actually want?

> So people say they want this, like they say they want McDonalds to offer salads. Nobody orders salads at McDonalds.

You seem to be missing that the people who have the means to eat out wherever they want don't eat at McDonald's every few hours. They go in moderation. They actively want to avoid McDonald's most of the time. Once in a while they get a craving, or get super hungry and don't see other options, etc. and they cave in and go there. Of course the get the tasty unhealthy option when they go, but it's foolish to think they prefer to eat McDonald's all the time. (Do you seriously believe that??)

Did you consider that you are gaming your own setup rules of measurement?

It's like "look nobody is ragebaited anymore, that's very bad for clicks"

Guess what, you should not have used that as a means of measurement before, but it was the cheapest way to sell it to advertisers.

If you have incentive to create a shithole of engagement, it's what you will get in return.

>Several times we ran A/B tests with many millions of people to try exactly this. Every time all the usage metrics tanked. Not just virality and doomscroll metrics, but how many likes, messages, comments, re-shares, and app-opens. We never even measured ad-related things on that team.

Well, yeah, but this has an implicit "engagement === good" assumption. Exactly the same thing that incentivizes unhealthy McDonald's food: they make more money when they sell food that still leaves you hungry. So, yeah, people probably did want this, and when they got it they started using Facebook in a healthy manner (no point opening it at every available moment to just scroll through 'new' trash), which tanked your metrics. If you're actually worrying about your users you should also consider that them using your product more might not actually be what they want or need.

Ironically enough, I think the same mistake (or rather, it's more of a mistake because there's not quite such a naked financial incentive to make this worse for the affected users) has happened with the youtube analytics dashboard: multiple youtubers have said that it's actively addicting and really bad for their mental health, but any change that feeds that probably looks really good in their metrics because, hey, creators are using it more, that must mean it's good, right?

I'm sure there's more that could be shared about how "wants" were determined, which would counter my off-the-cusp thought here, but anyways:

Yes... my ideal would be for facebook feed to be a once-a-week addiction (maybe a bit more) where I go, see what's new, and clearly hit an end point where I know I'm seeing things I've seen before. But I'm also part of the "problem" in that I post myself maybe twice/year now.

I'd suspect the current doomscroll-y feed like we have now/you were working on reduces my likelihood of "interacting" with friends' posts. "Do I make the effort of commenting, or lazily keep scrolling to the next-often-good 3rd party content?"

A year or two ago, I copied some greasemonkey type script off reddit, and that nuked all the non-friend content off my feed, but that stopped working a couple months later and I haven't been strongly enough motivated to find an updated approach. I have little enough friend activity that I'd easily notice when I hit old content.

The current doomscrolling feed of algo content sure does manage to hook me, so that's a nice indicator of the current team being successful :P

There's an old saying: you can never get enough of what doesn't fill your need.

For example, when you need sleep, you can't eat enough to make you not tired, but you may well pound a lot of caffeine and sugar.

If true, this would accomodate the simultaneous truths that:

(a) users accurately report their preference chronological friend connection when they come to a social feed

(b) users spend more time engaging with a social feed when the need they come to fill has irregularly payoffs

That you can get more engagement by not giving them what they want/need (or giving them what they need irregularly) wouldn't mean that they are lying to you, it would simply mean that engagement and social payoff curves aren't the same, and the incentives to drive one might not optimize the other.

You're saying that users weren't using the app enough like it's a bad thing. Users saw the tool as useful and used it.

This just opens the app for me on mobile. I guess on desktop it might do something.

For fb app users (most) I think bookmarks are irrelevant.

I literally have no idea what you're referring to, and I just updated the app. Could you share a link or screenshot or something?

Thanks for letting us know. Unfortunately we haven't been able to reproduce that with the current version of Firefox, but if you'd like to email us at hello@freefollow.org we'll add you to the list manually.

Nope.

iOS/iPhones are the majority of phones in Canada and the US (~60%). However, if you take the upper half of household incomes that number skyrockets to 80-90%. Comparatively, in the UK it's 50/50. In the rest of europe android mostly has a 60-75% market share (tends to drift more towards android the more eastern you go - signalling wealth has a lot to do with it).

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.

WhatsApp never caught on in the US since cell phones and SMS were a great deal for keeping in touch. By the time WhatsApp arrived US carriers were not raping their customers for phone calls or SMS messages (in the early days of cell phones they were - be very careful responding as the state of the world has changed many times over the years and so it is quite possible you remember a time where your country was better than the US for reasons that are no longer true!). Note in particular calls and SMS to a different state is included, and typically Canada is included as well. As such we never developed the WhatsApp habbit as it didn't give us anything.

Yes. WhatsApp isn't nearly as popular in the US as in many other countries.

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.

This. In 98% of all cases I get away with only having telegram (no phone number even) most people have one or multiple IMs

100%.

iMessage is THE number one thing selling iphones these days, and has been for a long time.

I see this line of thinking online a lot, with people mentioning kids are excluded because they have green bubbles as if it’s some sort of highly superficial exclusion based on only wanting to talk to Apple users.

The main issue is that including a non-iMessage user changes the protocol of the group chat from iMessage to SMS and SMS can basically make group chats unusable.

I also don’t like that kids who don’t have an iPhone can’t participate in iMessage group chats, but when we make out like it’s just kids being cruel and not an actual functional incentive to not include those kids then we are losing sight of where the pressure should be applied.

it's just a new version of "preps don't hang out with goths"

Adults too

I don't think seamless integration with MMS is enough to outweigh being different/not having "the real thing" or the full experience in the eyes of a young teenager. This reads as the HN version of the "but we have iMessage at home" meme (I mean this humourously, not as snark).

Even that has been fixed by now in my chats with android friends. The only reason to display green bubbles anymore is to indicate lack of E2EE. But that will be coming to RCS interop soon as well.

In theory it's ok. In practice, MMS group chats are broken. It's not even an iPhone thing, as evident in Android-dominated areas still relying on WhatsApp instead.

Non-iMessage chats are also segregated by color, a visual affordance that identifies you as a member of the non-Apple outgroup. The other.

iMessage chats also include rich media that is either degraded in MMS (photos, videos unless you have RCS support) or just doesn't exist (like multiplayer games, invites, apple cash, etc).

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.

You can have many group chats though?

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.

Do you mean 'run' as in run the community in some sort of administration sense? Telegram cannot be self-hosted (unless I am misinformed..).

>Who runs your Telegram server?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service

Is it - hear me out - possible that you are overthinking this? People tend to use group chats for coordination and quick banter with people they already know. Not as an alternative to the phpBB boards of old.

>It's a clear step backwards and is representative of the covid-era stazi-like mentality people developed where they felt it was unsanity to share their views or life with the world at large...

... what? I'm in my late 30's and group chats have been a part of life for myself, my friends and my family since the late 90's. I've never wanted to share my views with "the world at large" online, but I have no problem being myself and sharing my views in meatspace, where being open and honest about who I am is far more impactful to those I interact with and the world around me than it ever has been on social media.

Within the world of the pop-web, even on this website to a point, the ability to have a truly nuanced discussion has essentially been eliminated. People would rather throw out hot takes based on disingenuous interpretations of someone's comment/statement rather than try and have an impactful, open conversation.

There is nothing preventing you from expanding your group chat roster. It is just that random strangers can't drop in; you have to add them.

You would have to sacrifice the privacy of your group if you wanted to support serendipitous membership growth. Do you want to be constantly reviewing membership requests? That's what Facebook groups look like. And you have little information to judge the requests by, since the profiles can be fake, especially today. And when complete strangers can join the group, the dynamics change.

"Perfect world social media is a means of forming connections"

What stops people from being part of X group chats? All a connection on their own?

There's far too much downside to sharing your genuine thoughts, especially on politics, or things you find funny, etc. with the entire Internet because regular people and nation-state level actors will vilify you and nowadays even have you deported for things you say publicly.

That's why we all use group chats and messaging. There's no safe alternative

And markets are growing.

Heh, this reminds me of a vaguely related lesson I learned recently. Sold Nvidia mid-2023. "Surely everyone understands by now just how much money they're going to be making the coming 2 years, and this is already completely priced in, it's so blatantly obvious!". Heh.

Piles of VC cash were never necessary, FWIW. Tracking, potentially. They may indeed have massively undervalued ads, or even other monetization options - Line makes millions off of emojis and such, and if they'd have been as big as Whatsapp, possibly billions. Meta too is not even tapping 5% of Whatsapp's monetization potential, FWIW. I wonder if it's intentional to prevent anti-trust concerns.

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?

I remember using a lot of very low quality, buggy Skype apps on mobile over the years. I don't think it ever approached desktop quality.

To be honest it didn't even work great on laptops that got turned on and off or went in and out of connectivity. The networking piece seemed designed for an always on desktop.

Yes, that's why they should have made them work properly.

Simply put the main problem was that those old IMs required a persistent connection to the server when you "just" had to add a new protocol that can do session resumption/polling. Then make a pretty mobile UI and make it possible to find other users by phone number - imo this was the number one reason why WhatsApp and iMessage won. It's an app on your phone, so it uses your phone number, not another artificial number or name or mail address - it's something the most tech illiterate gets. Because then it's just "SMS but with groups and photos". But you could have allowed to merge it with your existing account from desktop times, so all the young hip people would've kept all their contacts.

i actually think it's good that you need to explicitly share the photo with each group. people like getting a message that they know you decided you wanted them (or their little group) to see.

if i see a photo that a friend broadcasts out once on a social feed, i see it and move on.

if a friend puts a photo in a text/group chat, i know that it's something they wanted to share with me

I think this was what Google Plus was going for.

Instead of friend graphs (mutual) or follower graphs (directed edges), they had Circles.

Circles sound a lot like group chats.

I guess "social circles" may be a better way to model social relationships than follower graphs.

>...but you have to share it specifically with each separate group

For me personally, this is a feature not a bug. I want things I see to be things that somebody wrote just for that channel. It's why I use group chat over social media.

Isn't it pretty common for the "share" function to allow selecting multiple recipients, including multiple groups?

Do your friends and family each have 10 things that happen to them every single day that is worth posting to a social network feed?