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.

> 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

A more VC speak of this is

"Strong ideas loosely held"

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.

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.

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.

Archived images barely remembered.

Time stands long frozen.

Dust of memories.

A museum of former self.

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

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.

Social media was fueled by a decade of low interest.

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.

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

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.

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.

The growth numbers don't show what people attribute to them. That timeframe aligns with increases in discretionary spending, and also QE/loose financing requirements. The boom bust cycle can easily be explained as a result of debt financing, and leveraged buyout.

The bust part of the cycle is what you get naturally when you finance poor investment choices.

This is the same Atari story, all over again. Those spends also don't appear to normalize against inflation.

Main console manufacturers also require additional costs which the developer must carry if you want to develop games on those platforms, and the industry has been devoid of anti-trust for decades, and exploitive of its workers (all which increase costs), and regulatory is paying much closer attention to deceptive business practices, with addictive design in some places being comparable to civil battery. The elements for this type of design are scientific, and are based in early last century torture findings.

What you naturally get is overinvestment, shortfall in delivery, stark losses, and a burning down of your supply logistics, where they stop carrying your goods, and won't carry your goods at any price (even on contingency), on top of the rising costs. In other words, you have benefits front-loaded, followed by diminishing returns, followed by outflows exceeding inflows. This is Ponzi, followed by deflation leaving the market chaotic.

Cooporation between large platforms and developer monopoly has shrunk the market over time as well. Extracting revenue in a race to the bottom, with fixed barriers to entry concentrating marketshare.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

> 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??)

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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

... 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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

where nothing is searchable, linkable, or otherwise legible. That's a tradeoff. It has some upsides, but downsides as well.

(granted search has been struggling to not suck in general lately, facebook among others has joined the campaign against legible links, so losses are taking place in web environments anyway)

Asking people to re-learn the new modalities and UIs and where everything is etc.. particularly for a less technical crowd.

Works great.

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.

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.

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.

Only that it's portable.

If we didn't have "social media" we'd be all watching samey tv series on our phones.

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?

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.

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.

Facebook groups are very disjointed and the algo does a bad job and keeping the good bits floating to the top.

How so? I find FB groups strictly worse than old-school forums.

It's embarrassingly dumb sometimes, too, like a post can show “3 comments”, I click it, and the “most relevant” will just be two of them with a bunch of empty space left over in the UI. Just show me all of the fucking comments omfg!!!

The ways fb is (still) the most useful to users are the ones meta cares the least about.

But yeah I agree, groups and marketplace are the only things keeping FB alive.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people

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.

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 same people Zuckerberg was accused of bullying out of the company)

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.

  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' IT Humor and Memes (UNCENSORED / Sanju L
  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / 90's Nostalgia
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  Suggested: click to show/hide 'Reels' /
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  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Sarah SilvermanVerified account
  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / History of Music
  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Minor League BaseballVerified account
  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Posts which will make you come
  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / How About that!
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  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Christians who enjoy good clea / Rachel Ballard
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  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Ancient history / Jesse Velosa
  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' / Cincinnati Symphony OrchestraVerified ac
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  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Back To The Future Real Fans!! / Lawrence Neville
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  Suggested: click to show/hide '${1}' Historic Film Locations / Mark E. Phillips
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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.

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.

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

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).

* 11 friends/page/groups

* 15 groups/pages that I haven't followed or interacted with.

Of those, the first post was a friend, the next 5 posts were groups or pages I haven't interacted with. It also shoved reels at me 3 times, further delaying me seeing the content I actually want to see.

Of those 11 posts from people I did specifically try to follow on FB, only 2 were from today (not sure if folks just haven't posted).

One of the posts from a friend was from 6 days ago that has never popped up in my feed before. What's notable to me about that delay is that I saw and interacted with a more recent post of theirs this morning. So I guess they've jumped up in priority in "the algorithm", so now it finally decides to show me it.

Of course, continuing in the grand tradition of "Facebook WTF", I went to scroll back up the feed to look for other signal and it's all gone. It doesn't even reliably show me my wife's feeds. (plus it does have that amazing feature where it'll give me a notification that she just posted/commented on something on facebook, and even lies about the time/date of posting until you refresh the page, while she's literally fast asleep beside me.)

I use FBP: https://www.fbpurity.com/faq.htm

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.