2017 Was Bad for Facebook. 2018 Will Be Worse
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Every. Single. Person. that I personally know despises the political crap, occasional venting of some personal problem, and news outrage fishing that comes across on there. I wish there was some way to "categorize" these posts, and to allow me to simply filter out what I don't want to see. As an example, there is a person I am friends with on there who I greatly admire and enjoy being friends with. But every time I see "Drumph" with a big red background, I sigh and scroll on. I don't need that in my life.
Even if that makes me miss the odd post here and there, they are practically valueless anyway and seeing only the categories of updates that I want greatly outweighs that minuscule loss.
If I didn't want to hear anything about these people's lives, I wouldn't have friended them in the first place. I don't want to have to block all of their posts just so that I don't have to deal with their obnoxiously-expressed views.
Ultimately, I think the norm of people posting political things on Facebook will go away--or at least, the only people being obnoxiously political on Facebook will be the same people who are obnoxiously political in real life. In the mean time, it's pretty annoying.
Less work than it sounds like. And as you say, bad for them, good for us.
It's not a left / right... trump / anything else item like you seem to be making (the original person gave an example, you seem to be taking his example personally).
The request seems pretty simple - give people a way to categorize the content they post and then give the friends a way to filter what comes into their daily stream of stuff by those categories.
I assume the main reason is the older members of your family only have facebook.
You can quickly curate your feed to something more pleasant. https://socialfixer.com/
I don't care what their kids ate today or how they fell asleep. I don't care that they bought a new phone and now posting pictures of it. I think all that stuff is personal and shouldn't be exposed to the public.
But I wish I could open FB and read political and tech news (no fakes please).
But they use all that data to show me pictures of crappy food, kids, drunk parties and stupid FB game ads.
But that's a good thing. It sounds like you WANT to be ensconced in a political bubble. People splitting off into echo chambers is a major source of the problems we see today.
You can only get personal updates on Facebook?
What a strange thing to say.
Does it make you feel like you care about them?
Here's what I'm getting at: if you really cared about someone, you wouldn't settle for the bare minimum of passively consuming their uploaded photos and status updates.
I posit that Facebook is popular among people with scattered friends and relatives because it makes them feel like they care. However, in my opinion, truly caring about someone warrants more than just maintaining an awareness of what is going on in their lives by consuming their content on your news feed and occasionally clicking 'Like' or posting a comment.
RIP Google Reader
Disclaimer: I have no kids, and im not on facebook
kids have no will, legally speaking, until they are not minors.
going to school is often 'against their will' as well, few argue that forcing them to go is an abuse of parental power..
that said, this is a different topic and of course you have a point.
News - anywhere but FB.
So what do I use FB for? Local groups, the community, yard sale, a few for specific interests. I might check it weekly.
I live 10k kilometers away from my family, so posting those things to Facebook is an easy way to keep each other up-to-date with our daily lives.
Make sure you have the originals of those pics backed up somewhere else. When I tried to use the "takeout" (not sure what's the proper fb name) to download all my FB content and get pics from a decade ago when I wasn't as diligent in backing, I was surprised to find out that fb gives you 800x600 versions of your photos, with all EXIF metadata wiped out, even though they still have the original size.
It was a big "oh, you want your stuff so you can leave fb? here's a big fuck you". They actually spent resources to make your experience worse.
They actually go the extra mile just to make your life shittier. Such a great company!
It's more like breaking out wallet snapshots at a party, handing them off to a middleman who scans and stores them for future analysis, then maybe shows them to your friends (with some advertisements mixed in) depending on whether or not their algorithm decides it's profitable to do so.
Personally, I use an adaptation of the "an unloaded gun doesn't exist" rule and think that once you put something on the Internet, anywhere on the Internet, it is accessible by everybody for ever.
Just use Instragram instead. It's FB with just pics.
I feel bad writing that because I like facebook. But I use it less and less in favor of messenger, just because I see less and less about my friends in my news feed.
Now their other acquisitions instagram and whatsapp seem pretty healthy, and VR is the future, so I wouldn't worry about the company as a whole.
I've never understood the pseudo-ephemerality of instagram. Even if you save stuff, or like it, the interface makes it very difficult to recall stuff from more than a few days ago.
Hypothesis: these businesses all monetize # of interactions (even if CPI is low), which they want to maximize by structuring interactions such that there is constantly new content that encourages obsessive checking. A sense of ephemerality of content reinforces that behavior ("I have to check because there is new content and it may be gone if I wait to check").
If anything I wish they would give an option in the settings to make it chronological
Unfortunately they're not measuring abandonment or annoyance. Metrics like these are the short-term gain investors of today tech, always looking into the today and ruining the tomorrow.
Why? It's a terrible company and Zuckerburg is kind of a jerk.
I have no data to substantiate but I doubt if it is true. May be in first world but coming from India, I believe there is still a huge market for Facebook. Internet literally means WhatsApp and Facebook to masses who are now getting affordable mobile phone and data connectivity.
Um, no. Facebook remains the most popular app in the United States with a comfortable lead. It's surpassed only by its own Whatsapp and Messenger globally. I think I read that in terms of time spent in an app, Facebook still beats Whatsapp, but I can't find the stat right now. Facebook just crossed 2 billion MAUs this year.
Its advertising revenue grows at close to 50% a year. Obviously part of that is showing more ads per user, but it's also growth in app usage. I'd say the cow keeps sprouting new udders and they are feverishly trying to keep up with attaching the pumps.
Keeping up-to-date with multiple people using FB is like trying to watch multiple shows in short snippets concurrently mixed together. When you could just wait a bit and then watch it all as a contiguous story or have a real meaningful conversation with a person to catch up over dinner or something.
The little snippets people share on FB probably are also less personal, imo. It's stuff they're announcing to everyone instead of sharing with you or a small group.
It just doesn't feel like actually "keeping in touch" to me. Feels more like promoted content (from the people and the actual ads).
I have some friends who live too far away to visit that I do set some time aside to have an occasional video chat with.
I will point out that the parent seems to be referring to the posts that people make to no specific recipient. That is not keeping contact with your friends, this is watching your friend make an appearance on TV, so to speak. Admittedly neat the first time you see it, but the novelty quickly fades when they are "on TV" every day.
Yes, Facebook Messenger and Groups do actually provide a decent service for keeping contact with friends around the world. You can absolutely use Facebook in that way, but, from the perspective of business longevity and health, does it really provide more than similar services that do the same?
Personally, I'm not sure the network effects are as strong when talking about friends keeping in contact with each other. If I want to check in with a close friend who lives abroad, it is not a huge barrier to ask for their phone number or email address. And chances are I already have that information.
The one value proposition that Facebook does have, in my option, is that it is the internet's "telephone book". For acquaintances that you want to contact and have to look them up to find them, it is a pretty good bet that you will find them on Facebook. But there is also plenty of competition here as well, such as Linkedin, which seems to embrace the "telephone book" concept even more so than Facebook.
Mostly one to one, meaning more time investment if you want to reach a bunch of people with some news. Or maybe a mailing list you'd have to manage (which can be quite a chore thanks to spam). Dependency on high/reliable bandwidth for the video-char route. Again, utility to one might not equal utility to others. Some people have less free time to do everything in the way you or wybiral might, or maybe they just have different preferences. Maybe they actually enjoy seeing two of their friends who would otherwise never meet discover a common interest, or maybe even have a good argument, in the comment thread for something they posted. Maybe they're perfectly happy with "short snippets concurrently mixed together" and would derive less utility from your alternatives. It's awfully judgmental, and even a bit privileged, to assume that you're doing social life right and they're doing it wrong.
There is no right and wrong, but the fact remains that watching a carefully curated TV program featuring your friend is not keeping contact with your friend. It is watching your friend play a role on TV.
Hey, if that makes you happy, I'm not here to judge. It makes no difference to me if someone likes watching TV and is able to feel a connection to the players shown. But I think for most people the novelty of seeing their friend on TV starts to wane over time. I think for most people friendship requires mutual reciprocation and involvement, not glimpses of the person appearing on their TV each night.
Maybe I'm way off base, but from a business perspective, it seems Facebook has to maintain its attractiveness in spaces where competition is already high, and where there is little barrier for users to switch to on a whim. The network effects that have allowed Facebook to become what it is do not seem to be there long-term.
To me FB just seems like an extra dose of that unnecessary smalltalk mixed with self-promotion with the only real benefit being basically an address book.
These days I can arrange to hook up with an old colleague through Facebook because of Facebook and via Facebook and know exactly where s/he is in terms of work/relationships/kids, without the social pressure to spout the traditional cliches.
Not sure who made that product decision but it was lethal for me.
Perhaps more generally: money ruins everything.
According to multiple lines of argument, the value of a network for users scales like O(n log(n)) where n is the number of users. The log(n) factor is sufficiently small that a new and better platform can get traction if the user experience on the most popular one degrades enough.
Now this has actually been happening, but Facebook has learned from what happened to Friendster and then MySpace and has been buying up potential competitors such as Instagram and Whatsapp. However it is just a question of time until a successful competitor doesn't sell..then manages to take Facebook's crown from it.
This probably won't happen within 5 years. I'd give it even odds in 10. But I wouldn't bet on Facebook remaining king for 20.
See http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf for some of the lines of evidence leading to that scaling conclusion.
I'm not saying he's entirely wrong, but a lot of what he's saying sounds very much like how TV was once described.
Now the average adult in the US watches 5 hours a day, 35 hours a week.
Were they wrong?
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watch...
I used to be in the Nielsen TV surveys, for the manual data entry (IIRC they had a thing that attached to your TV but I wasn't in the automated survey portion). They had some tiny reward program with a dollar showing up in the mail every once in a while. I believe the average person is probably a little like me and too lazy to fill in every single thing they watch and self conscious sometimes, too, about self reporting too much. The manual diary was pretty laborious.
Yes, cable TV expanded TV beyond the "big networks" (CBS/NBC/ABC etc.) but the democratization of news, reporting and information spreading is entirely new.
I mean, HN, Reddit and what other social sites do the same thing, and you could still go where you want without relying on internet“channels” or google searches, but most people don’t.
Echo chambers are a dangerous thing that people should be educated about early and often.
Good point, I would say however that you create/add the sources first (by following), Facebook then guides what you see, based on your behavior.
Facebook doesn't decide upon, and broadcast a pre-determined message - they simply work off of your preferences, and try to give you more of what you want (not need) with a healthy side of advertising.
Calling attention to Neil Postman’s __Amusing Ourselves to Death__ is the usual rejoinder to a statement like this. But, Daniel J. Boorstin’s __The Image__[1][2], published in 1962, just about perfectly presages the outcomes of 2016 – 2017 vis-à-vis social media; I cannot commend it enough.
(N.B television (especially with news shows) is also both a form of, and antecedent to what we call social media.)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Image-Guide-Pseudo-Events-America/dp/...
[2] http://www.transparencynow.com/boor.htm, (Disclaimer: I don't know anything about this site, having just discovered it a few seconds ago, but it provides a nice summary of the book).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Image:_A_Guide_to_Pseudo-e...
Facebook is intense. I catch myself getting caught in the feedback loops all the time now, it's very potent. It's different than video games, because those are time-gated too (loading times, takes time to find a multiplayer match, takes time to build your base or whatever). But with facebook, you can keep scrolling and scrolling. And you can quickly skip parts of videos that are uninteresting.
Even with books, it's all in how you intepret it. If you just read the story without giving it any thought, it's no better than watching "mindless TV". I just think there is probably a positive correlation between people that are willing to think critically about a topic and those who are willing to put in the additional effort of reading vs watching.
To put it another way, if you knew nothing of painting or any the history behind it, the Mona Lisa would likely be indistinguishable to you from some random photo on someone's Facebook.
I will admit that some forms of media are easier to mindlessly consume than others. I am just sick of seeing the "X is only for stupid/lazy/ignorant people" (where X is TV, internet, videogames, etc.)
tl;dr you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
Edit: to get back to the topic of Facebook, I think the format of social media is not the cause of the issue, but I definitely see a problem in people having high exposure to insular opinions. Mostly because there seems to be a large number of people who only use Facebook as their source of information. Like any tool, you can use it for good or bad.
Suppose we were to say, “Apple pie is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines its value.” Or, “The smallpox virus is in itself neither good nor bad; it is the way it is used that determines their value.”
- Marshall McLuhan
Sure, we can imagine a theoretical beneficial use for almost any object. However, we shouldn't be blind to the fact that certain things tend to cause more harm, even when we try to prevent it.
Note, I'm not saying how exactly we should respond to more dangerous objects, I'm just saying we should not falsely claim that they aren't dangerous.
The above also confounds what I'm saying with some predetermination that some are born to become addicts.
The medium is the message.
Edit: I'm not saying the medium has zero influence on the message. I'm just pointing out that a) the medium does not dictate the message, and b) effectively "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
Looking at it this way makes a lot of sense.
He did not contend that the content was meaningless, or lacked a message. He did, however, quip throughout his life that focusing on the content is putting the cart before the horse.
Now, when TV is part of our life we're used to that brainwashing and most people don't notice it any more.
also tv is a one way broadcasting system when facebook is like 2 way system ...
> Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. [...] I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation. Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.
Apparently it was excerpted from the author's book. I wonder if the book is good.
Oh wait, too soon?
I want to point out you can invest in something that you think will end up giving a good return even if you personally disagree with what the company or security does. I'd love to be wrong on my investment and see Facebook crumble and society free from it's harmful influences, but if that doesn't happen, at least the money I get from it's ever rising stock price will give me some comfort for a while. It's a win-win scenario, and pre-empts me from taking any stance in favor or against Facebook, which actually has some present value for me.
The other guy joked about Blackberry, because even as the US and Canadian markets were dumping Blackberry, the company continued to see some nice growth overseas, which also led to record sales, profits and so on. But it was obvious Blackberry was fighting against time with the iPhone destroying its core markets.
Most investors didn't see it at the time either, because they were just following the "positive quarterly results," much like Blackberry's leadership was.
Citation?
It's not their money. It's your pension. They get paid regardless.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
That last parenthetical about overselling points to a fourth line of attack: fraud. There's been a lot of rumbling for years that FB (and Google for that matter) are not doing enough to combat fake clicks / views / likes and are essentially ripping off advertisers. If everyone smells blood in the water all of a sudden due to these other issues heating up, there could be a lot of pressure on these companies to provide more transparency. That could bring their revenues way down.
I don't want your app. The site works fine until you broke it.
>kenning:
I think cigarettes are a great comparison. I heard it a few years back.
When popular, a huge amount of the population used cigarettes despite growing research showing that it had a slight but consistent harmful effect. A hooked individual is unlikely to stop using even when given this evidence, as the product is addictive and gets stronger with network effects. Younger generations understood the harm better and had to avoid regular temptation to engage.
So what is the problem here? the fact that anybody around the world can buy influence on Facebook? When you needed millions before to buy a spot on TV or newspapers?
It's the black smith complaining about the automaker all over again.
A simplified version goes something like: Social media feeds are controlled by computer algorithms (AI) and the psychological, social, and political effects of social media are, at best, poorly understood and may, at worst, run counter to the long term goals of the humans building and using those systems.
Also, because these systems are generally autonomous (complex-ish AI), systems which do run counter to the goals of society may be doing so without the intention of the systems' builders.
This was covered here on HN a few days ago [0] and the featured video by Zeynep Tufecki is clear and accessible (23 mins). [1]
Another compelling analysis into the unexpected negative effects of AI in social media (in the domain of YouTube children's videos) is James Bridle's "Something is wrong on the internet" which was featured on HN back in November of this year. [2]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014
[2] https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2
But other then that, I largely agree with you. The Facebook hate lately is weird.
I think facebook has to do much larger research on the impact it is having on wider group of people and not just in western world in terms of politics, news, kids, humans behavior, etc. I have seen people spending hours and hours of unproductive time on facebook in very poor and developing countries where the same time could have been used for more useful stuff.
1. More friendlier to businesses - after each N number of posts (where N sometimes < 5) we can see sponsored posts
2. Feeling of stalking - after searching few things in e-commerce sites (the exact same items getting listed in advertisements of sponsored feed). Though its through the Ad affiliation this happens, its totally creepy to see the "things" you searched for following you all over the social media.
3. Pushing for wider attention - though you haven't uploaded any picture of you, if in someone else's photo you get a part (even in a corner) all your friends will be notified!
4. Always-on-top - Their messenger app displays always-on-top floating bubble in mobile phones whenever there is a notification! Never ever look anywhere else!
5. Feeling of being their product - if the data we generate (not the moments we cherish) is their selling point for being an attractive platform, then there is no human part to it. We are just the products they sell!
6. Getting annoyed when an user doesn't login for a long time - sending an email and text message to say "if you have trouble logging please click this link"
7. Thank you animations other custom generated animations - All these animations are auto generated (may be mostly using AI), though in the end of the animation it says "Team FB", its more of a "AI @ FB". Why bother creating it, if it is auto generated!
The hedge fund and institutional investing world has fallen in love with facebook because it obviously is growing like crazy and scale and in a profitable manner, but also because it is viewed by many as a modern-day "value investment" (strange as that sounds), in the sense it has a powerful competitive moat and compounding returns on investment. but ultimately this thesis comes down to placing more paid ads in front of users. facebook will have to choose between cramming more and increasingly intrusive ads into its platform or dealing with a falling stock price. when it happens who knows, but it will at some point
the regulatory risk is real but vague. out of curiousity, i wonder how many people thought the regulatory risk for microsoft in the late 90s was real
So,this feeling of being heard can only satisfy you temporarily until a certain point, meaning until you realize you need something more. Facebook has failed iked at what their main purpose is: communication.
Is there an alternative? Yeah, it's called life, listening, opportunities, etc.
My 2 cents.
The start of the vaccine(/backlash/response) to social media has begun.
Maybe there's an analogue at work here; like financial/wealth inequality, but for intellect (that feels incredibly elitist to 'verbalize').