How Facebook makes us dumber
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1. You're advertising another company for free. Is Facebook paying you to put their logo on your site? No.
2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there. If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business.
3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page.
4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people).
- Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors:
1. You are in control of your list.
2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free.
There are several reasons for that:
- First (at least for me), an unsolicited e-mail goes directly into trash and I seek the unsubscribe button. Under no circumstances I am interested in additional stuff somebody has to offer beyond the first service.
- People who did not buy your stuff/service can still like you on Facebook, they can do it after they have forgotten some login to your site etc.
- The single best advertising that actually works is recommendation from friends. I think that seeing that somebody else liked something on your feed gets pretty close to that.
- People do like to have all of their "Internet" in one place. Why go to mail if they can have everything in their feed?
- If you use Facebook then they solve a huge number of stuff for you - administration, spam filtering, server hosting, account management (there are other solutions to this of course, but it is good to be able to throw all of this on somebody else)
- I think posting on media sites wastes no more time than creating mailing lists and also requires less tools.
- Advertising for Facebook is mutually beneficial, the more people there are, the more you can reach.
- Also, ads on Facebook have great reach (from what I have heard) and are quite cheap.
- I would hazard a guess that most people are more likely to have notifications on for Facebook rather than e-mail.
Facebook is also probably not going to fail, preparing for this scenario is a nice thought exercise but at some point you have to have some faith in your suppliers. Same goes for Google (mail, docs), Dropbox (file history), Github (issue tracker, code reviews).
So, not worth much anymore.
If you're not getting any interest in any posts at all, maybe your content is just not interesting. Facebook always shows some of your posts to some of your followers.
Have you looked at a stock chart of Facebook recently? All time high basically and worth $220b.
Or did you mean the value the company brings to the user?
That you can pay Facebook to reach those people again has value, that's why people do it.
They didn't like it right then and there, it's just that an advert is showing and FB pulls up people you can relate to as others who recommend it.
And in the middle of the circle of unity is us, the early adopters.
All we have to do is give Xenu all of our material belongings and buckle in for the incredible rewards coming our way!
So yes, email is great, but marketing is multi-channel or pointless. Facebook is the single biggest channel out there.
Yes, you have to invest some $$ in Facebook to get above the noise floor, but again: that's marketing. Email costs money too. Nothing comes for free.
First of all, it doesn't matter. Facebook is not your competitor, so you're not harming yourself.
Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform. Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are. If you want to reach people, you want to be where they are.
> 2. When people like/follow your page, they are trapped by FB(or some other social media) and you can only reach them there.
Facebook is not trapping anyone inside. If you mean that you can't contact them out-of-band, then well, that's by design and actually a feature.
> If you're banned or they pull bait-and-switch on you, like Facebook did, you've wasted all this time building user base for Facebook and not building your business.
Most businesses come to the rational conclusion that this almost never happens, and the small risk is worth being where the customers are.
> 3. You can't even reach them on Facebook, because you now have to pay Facebook to reach people that have already liked your page.
That is totally by design and again, very much a feature.
For some reasons businesses think they're entitled to "reaching out" to people with their unsolicited offers. They're not. We don't want your spam. Neither your, nor that of any of hundreds of companies we deal with every month. The etiquette here is the Hollywood principle - don't call us, we'll call you.
> 4. Posting on social media wastes a lot of time and money(tools + people).
It's actually simpler than writing quality e-mails, or quality snailmails. There is some additional work because people will reach out to you more through Facebook than through conventional channels, and you need someone to handle the communication.
> - Compare this to getting an email address from your visitors:
> 1. You are in control of your list.
Which is something we, the customers, don't want.
> 2. You can reach them anywhere & anytime almost for free.
And that we absolutely, positively don't want most of the time.
I mean, I get it. There are some exchanges we both agree that we want to have. You can't make a reliable newsletter via Facebook, nor I would like to get my account info through Messenger. But please move your ad communications to Facebook, where they will be unobtrusive for us and properly curtailed by the platform.
You start by saying that Facebook is not a competitor, but in taking over part of your core business--- keeping track of potential customers--- it could be seen as that.
> Secondly, Facebook is an immensely popular communications platform. Even if for some reason you dislike them because they're privately owned, it doesn't change the fact that that's where people are. If you want to reach people, you want to be where they are.
Facebook's objective is total control of all communication and it will stubbornly refuse to allow the migration of its data off platform. It will fight tooth and nail to prevent any other competing alternatives for social communication (such as open ones like email) from being seen as viable. Frankly, that's a business risk for us all, because it moves control of communication into the hands of a third party. By coming down hard in support of them you are doing an important part of their marketing dirty work.
The net benefit for consumers is unclear. They may like it now but we are still in the honeymoon phase of this monopolistic process.
> I mean, I get it. There are some exchanges we both agree that we want to have. You can't make a reliable newsletter via Facebook, nor I would like to get my account info through Messenger. But please move your ad communications to Facebook, where they will be unobtrusive for us and properly curtailed by the platform.
Your support for them is so superlative that I have to ask: Do you have a stake in Facebook?
I never checked it out personally, but from what I heard, Facebook allows for integration with various third-party CRMs and stuff, so you still get to track potential and existing customers to your heart's content.
Your points are valid in a long-term view. Facebook monopolizing communication is not a good thing. But since when do most businesses care about that? It won't affect their bottom-line at all. It's a worry for consumers.
> Your support for them is so superlative that I have to ask: Do you have a stake in Facebook?
I have no stake in Facebook and I'm not affiliated with the company in any way. My support being "so superlative" is because as a user and customer, I hate business communication. Most of the stuff companies send is a waste of time for me, and I value my time. I'd like businesses to use Facebook more precisely because it makes spamming me harder. :). That, and since it's all engineered so that it is in company's interest to allow people to comment on their stuff, suddenly you can communicate with them under public view of other customers - so you won't be ignored so easily when you have a legitimate complaint.
If keeping track of lists of potential customers is such an integral part of your core business that someone else doing it is "competition", then it can be plausibly argued that you're in the spam business, at least to some degree.
No, it wasnt like that when most of the Pages acquired the bulk of their followers, they could reach all their audience freely. It was a shitty idea solely to make money, it didn't "add value" to users. There were other, more meaningful ways to implement this, e.g. show Page posts on a separate tab, have limits of posts/day etc. Paying for views is a bad strategy to improve quality; imagine if HN worked like that.
So for example Facebook pages like "Humans of New York" or "I Fucking Love Science" or "Amy Poehler's Smart Girls" still get popped into a lot of timelines despite (to my knowledge) not paying at all for boosting. Why? Because a lot of people love that content.
But if some other Facebook page saw a huge drop-off that stayed dropped off, then maybe that content is just not as interesting as other pages (like the ones above for example).
And in fact this is why Facebook made changes to page content visibility in the first place. Most pages posted boring obvious ads instead of interesting content.
Pages can still pay for higher visibility, but those are ads. Just like people can pay to "get into the New York Times"--via ads, not articles. And just like the NY Times, there is only a fixed amount of ad inventory at Facebook. Even when pages are paying, Facebook limits their audience, in order to keep the audience happy. No one wants to see a newsfeed full of 100% ads. Or even 50% ads. Or 25%.
Just go and count how many things you've liked so far. I have 821 "items" liked, most of them fanpages. If every one of them would be able to reach me with all their posts, I'd quit Facebook on the spot. The users are not there for the fanpages. That's why Facebook won't let companies hit everyone. Now whether or not they should allow people to pay for wider reach, that's questionable, but then again - it at least makes people prioritize. If you have a limited marketing budget, you will tend to pay for and thus prioritize more important communication.
But then again, Facebook has to get the money for their servers from somewhere (or at least enough of it to attract more investors). They could've chosen worse monetization strategies.
On HN you don't actually get to choose the content in any meaningful way, and therefore have no means of creating an echo chamber for yourself through other means then down voting.
[Stanisław Lem]
To be honest, it seems a lot like the oil companies: major worldwide energy powers with vested interest in extracting fossil fuels from the earth then selling them to billions of users to burn, which is detrimental to everyone.
A lot of these mega-scale corporations manage to get away with mass-scale detrimental effects because of a general state of addiction to their product, which was legitimately new and useful at an earlier point in time. That, and after a certain point they become too powerful for any one country to stop.
For controversial stuff, the bubble is definitely a minus. For factual queries, it just makes things easier (yes, when I type 'python' I don't mean the reptile)
I persisted and find that although the results are different, they are often just different. Once I became used to DDG it's started to seem like Google is the broken one.
It did take a while for me to switch, maybe 3 tries before it was working right.
- Queries need more grooming to get to relevant results (search for things in Dublin, get results for Ireland/Ohio/California mixed)
People tend to align themselves with other people and communities who share similar beliefs. You can often see this where people Like and Share these meme images with some "profound" message (eg. "A real man/woman ...") when they like, agree with or find interesting for some or other reason.
So, what IMO would be interesting to see is how these things changes their world view and self-image. Are they replacing the reality of life with a simulacra (the meme; Social Media "friends" I supposed can be argued to be another simulacra)? How much more likely are they to like/share to share posts from others who they perceive to have similar world-views, even if they know very little about the topic? How likely are they to defend ideas which they only have by virtue of their social connection to other people?
Sure the idea that Facebook makes us dumber might have some truth in it. But it cannot be fairly evaluated unless one proves that the alternative Network Television or Grandma email forwards were not making us even more dumber before Facebook rose to prominence.
For example, Facebook news feed is driven by an algorithm to push posts you are likely to be interested in. Liking an anti-vaccination post or anti-immigration post will surely result in more similar content in your news feed.
So Facebook inadvertently might be reinforcing confirmation bias more than anything else due to content being filtered and personalized to you only.
(I think, in the big picture, our opinions on this overall point do align, so please don't completely disregard my comment :).)
I believe managed, licenced hunting in Africa supports conservation efforts, there is no reason ever to spank or hit a child, all children should be vaccinated, and pitbulls are dangerous.
So, most people have unfriended and/or blocked me on Facebook. Now I live in a bubble. I'm not bothered by people who don't agree with me. I'm bothered by people who can't debate these topics without getting riled up. The African hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister. I can understand the business decision behind letting people live in a bubble.
I have noticed this myself. I think it mostly comes from not knowing what or how to make an argument. For instance if I state a argument such as
Premise 1: All men are mortal. Premise 2: Socrates is a man. Conclusion: Therefore, Socrates is a mortal.
To refute my argument someone would have to demonstrate how my first two premises or my conclusion was wrong. Usually everyone just bashes the conclusions but never refutes the premises of the argument.
The other potential reason is that you posted it to the wrong community. There are, unfortunately, groups of people who get the more angry the more you try to back up your point with science. Best to avoid those. They can be convinced, but it requires a lot of work and careful dancing around their egos.
> The African hunting topic ended with someone threatening my little sister.
What the hell. Who are these people? :o. I'm sorry this happened to you and I totally support staying away from such groups.
I can see how the issue with that woman could cause some opposition - if I understand it correctly (she told she turned out fine, you pointed her out that in fact she didn't), I can see myself being in disagreement (depending on the full context). But unfriending over things like that? This surprises me. Their loss, sadly, they chose to form a bubble around themselves.
Thanks for responding with details!
This is why you're getting downvoted. That's not how you convince people.
The former requires a level of emotional intelligence and coercion in addition to any logical arguments. Why? Because people are people and they will only resent you if you just mechanically present arguments even if you're 100% right. They will look for any reason to say you're wrong even if it doesn't make sense. That's why sometimes, it's just not worth participating in some arguments. Context matters.
My limited personal experience of the results of disincline (of all kinds) is that inconsistent or random discipline from a parent is worse than almost all others. Children who live in fear of being disciplined for what appears to them to be for no reason, or where their actual behaviour plays very little role in affecting the discipline they experience, fair far worse. It is really hard as a parent, but being consistent is critically important. No means no.
> Spanking remains a common, if controversial, childrearing practice in the United States. In this article, I pair mounting research indicating that spanking is both ineffective and harmful with professional and human rights opinions disavowing the practice. I conclude that spanking is a form of violence against children that should no longer be a part of American childrearing.
My stance is consistent with the recommendations of the American Psychological Association [2] and the American Academy of Pediatrics [3].
The issue is can we have a discussion about it without unfriending each other on Facebook building protective bubbles.
[1]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3768154/
[2]http://www.apa.org/about/policy/corporal-punishment.aspx
[3]https://www.healthychildren.org/English/family-life/family-d...
You always hear some fucking idiot saying "my child ran out into the street, so I hit him". Hear the useless parent put their child at risk of harm by not teaching the child about road safety, by not providing adequate supervision in a dangerous situation, and then punishing the child for the parent's lack of skill.
"I hit my children" is no different from "I hit my spouse" or "I hit my employees".
I think we can avoid false emotional comparisons between spanking a young child and beating your wife.
Some views are unappealing at an emotional level without much reasoning coming in to it?
Therefore, I think that a good next-gen social media website is going to have to offer multiple levels of interaction depending on the level of the user themselves.
For example, some users want twitter level interaction. <200 character headlines, <200 character comments
Others want a bit of expansion, maybe some commentary, but nothing too cumbersome or technical.
Another group wants citations for everything, but may not want discussion too extensively.
Yet another group wants extensive discussion that flows ideas back and forth, and educates all participants.
Another group wants both citations and discussion (I know it's hard to seperate, but bear with me).
To me, the fundamental mistake is that we are throwing all users of all types into a pool of mediocrity, to the point where perhaps trolling is somewhat limited, but excellence in discussion is also limited due to interuptions of the limited trolling. The troll doesn't want to and generally can't participate in the lengthy discussion.
So my proposed social media site works in two ways:
1) Stories are segmented into expected level of complexity. Eg, there is a twitter version of a story, a short paragraph version of story, an article version of story, and an extensive version with citations version of story. Any user can access whichever level they choose at any time... but...
2) Posting, instead of arbitrary points which tend to be about liking vs disliking arguments despite things like reddiquette, is about two factors.. quality of comment (upvotes but no downvotes for comment quality) and logical strength regardless of position, handed out in a slashdot style random mod distribution to those who opt in to participate in logical analysis of comments...
Users all start with limited commenting and submission capabilities. As a user shows they are adding value though, they get more priviledges, and conversely, as trolls troll, they get temp and perma-bans based on level. (so a troll can still troll the twitter level comments, but not the citation level comments)
What do you think about a system like this, or do you have any other ideas on how to defeat this kind of warping of the social media world without excluding the users who just want to make pun threads all day?
The bottom line is that I want a way to encourage and reward logical and rational discussion and debate for all levels of users, but allow users who wish to remain stagnant to at least participate in the way they so desire.
What FB have helped with is to make sure that neither newspapers nor politicians will be able to communicate in a vacuum.
What we see now is the first steps of a more enlightened society not a dumber one because dissent both gets normalized and much better access to minds it didn't before.
Of course there is going to be people who think alike or people who only befriend people who think exactly like them. But the second they want to spread their gospel outside their groups they are going to be met with a lot of other perspectives and thats a good thing.
edit: typos
There's a natural conflict of interest. In the real world, we are forced to live with and confront those of widely varying opinions. Many times this is a huge pain in the ass. But it's good for the species overall. Over time, initially unpopular and ugly opinions get vetted: about one in a 100/1000 turn out to be a critical evolution in the way all of us think about ourselves.
In the virtual world, no such limits exist. We cannot afford to have the 1% folks who destroy discourse, so we just magically make them not exist. People share and promote emotional things which the vast majority can agree on. Instead of the outliers driving change, we begin to norm down those farther and farther out on the bell curve.
So people turn inward to their phones and tribes. We physically live next to each other, but we don't actually live with each other. Instead of a diverse and accomplished species, we are slowly becoming one large, comfortable mob.
It's the same on HN and on your Facebook feed, as it was on the old topical boards and mailing lists. You can argue for any controversial position you like as long as you do this in a civil and substantial way. What ends up happening is people getting split into two camps - those who can discuss things in a detached way and learn from them, and assholes who just want to call people names. Or, in terms of pg's hierarchy of disagreement[0], groups tend to split somewhere around DH3-DH4 level.
Which is totally fine, IMO. Unfortunately most Internet denizens seem to be in the "DH3 and below" group. What we need to figure out is how to make them abandon their ways and join the civilized world.
That's why a lot of media/politics criticizes social networks because it questions their role and place in the society.
Should anything be done?
Entertain the possibility that what is observed is not really about the "facts," but intragroup signalling serving to maintain group cohesion.
But yeah, since we all hate those groups...
I view Facebook as a means to strengthen existing "physical" friendship, rather than a place to get unbiased information. So in that sense this is neither surprising, nor detrimental. Imagine what will happen if your friends start correcting your political views...
For less biased information, please refer to twitter. And please don't mix Facebook friends with twitter followings.
What describe the article is not a Facebook problem, it's an Internet problem, Google and Youtube make you as dumb as Facebook does.
Of course there were some strong biases in these 'older' communities too (views on sexuality, abortion, etc.), but generally speaking people inside them varied greatly in political views, social class, upbringing, lifestyle, habits, and so on. It gave a face to many opinions that I would consider offensive or dangerous, and by extension an understanding and empathy that is much more difficult to have these days (for me).
I fear for the future of our societies (and social safeties) in part because of this. Changing views often starts with mutual respect, and that's much more difficult to do when opinions get separated from those who hold them, and when interaction is increasingly opt-in.
I use mine actively, but from the discussions here it sems I'm in the minority.
Hacker News is making us dumber.
Deleted comment
And then the example plus explanation.
> Arriving at these judgments on your own, you might well hold them tentatively and with a fair degree of humility. But after you learn that a lot of people agree with you, you are likely to end up with much greater certainty
This mechanism is considered extreme? Why? When a lot of people agree with me on some issue then naturally I'll be more confident in expressing my views.
So what if Facebook pairs tin foil hat wearers together so they can share their views? I doubt that they'll start believing that they are now the mainstream.
I suspect that the writer of this article just deeply resents the fact that persons with out of the norm beliefs or thoughts can now effectively organise and exchange ideas which in turn directly threatens the journalists monopoly on creating the mainstream narrative.
It is a good thing that ideas and views from other perspectives are now widely available online. You now can watch RT and then CNN or FOX and conclude that basically all of these channels are just feeding us propaganda crap with different goals.