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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it’s actually used around the world.

Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here’s what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call:

"There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily."

That’s a lot more monthly active users than Snapchat has — for a part of the app which everyone automatically assumes to be a flop. That’s what global 2.3 billion users looks like: your local anecdata doesn’t tell anything.

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In reality, it appears that there is a media scapegoating crisis, not an actual crisis, at or with Facebook: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

Wow, that’s the best take on this entire thing I’ve read. I’ve been saying much of this for months and I’m also not an active Facebook user.

The market’s had a hard time deciding what to make of all the “scandals” but the past few headlines have had less and less of an effect on the stock. The TC article that came out yesterday had absolutely zero effect which surprised me a little and the news that they might receive a record fine a week or two ago knocked the stock down for literally twelve minutes before it sprang back up (I was following it that day). I think the market is finally ready to move past all of this and focus on what moves Facebook is going to make going forward because it’s quite obvious users and advertisers don’t care about any of this.

I think there are two camps out to get Facebook for reasons that go beyond privacy- media outlets threatened by its existence and Twitter users who have amassed a large following and view it as an “us versus them” dynamic because they’ve come to rely on Twitter as a communication mechanism. To view Twitter as any better is completely illogical but media outlets are happy to choose favorites if it suits them.

yeah, twitter users are notorious for how much they love jack and twitter

I’ve been saying it forever. The media hates new forms of advertising because that was their missed opportunity. The media had gotten out of control regardless. They are about as factual and unbiased as a state run news organization at this point.

Hopefully it will be possible to have reasonable discourse on HN again instead of the constant flaming.

you're being downvoted but i think it's crazy that people ignore the obvious economic incentives that a publicly traded company like the new york times has to wage war against a company that has siphoned their main source of revenue

There's proof of the media conglomerates not liking Facebook and doing everything in their power to stop them and similar companies, one just needs to look at the whole situation surrounding the EU copyright directive, Art. 11 and 13. The main reason it almost passed and threatened to screw with the state of the internet as we know it is because major German media conglomerates lobbied for it heavily to use it as a weapon against companies like Facebook and Google. The whole directive being inspired by a similar legal solution that's been tried in the past by Spain, under similar consequences by similar actors towards the same targets -- it failed spectacularly. Regardless, media conglomerates were willing to use money to force a legal win against online entities they fear are in control of some of their revenue and future.

I have to admit some confusion here.

Is it that the media companies are going broke because of FB and so they hate them, or is it media companies have vast amounts of capital at their disposal to try and bring them to ruin.

My understanding of media’s situation is quite different, and the downswing started occurring a longer time before FB came around.

First hand I can tell you that they don’t expect to take FB down and return to former glory.

Some are even looking at buyouts to return to more of a startup/reboot phase. Not a conspiracy to stick it to anyone else.

That’s an interesting perspective.

It occurs to me that the mainstream American media suddenly turned very negative towards Facebook ever since they've got the idea that Facebook was probably one important reason that Trump got elected. While I agree Facebook has some real problems and they need to do better, but the recent reports appears almost nitpicking to me

So, the linked article is simply flaming the media, as far as I can see.

The media has always put dominant companies under substantial scrutiny, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Equifax have all had their fair share of tough stories over the years.

I see nothing particularly unfair in the way that Facebook's travails have been reported. Rather than talking in generalities, perhaps you could give some specific examples of stories that have treated Facebook unfairly.

I was super impressed on the recommendations from FB watch where I just kept it auto-playing the next and the next video. Their tech isn't as good, their videos are choppier than youtube and netflix, but their recommendations were insanely good.

Ooh that's interesting. I'm not surprised by how great their recommendations are; Facebook's AI research team is pretty top notch. I wonder what they're doing for recommendations.

Yeah the recommendations are absolutely horrible for me. They must know so much about me, yet two of the top ten videos were in foreign languages (which I do not speak). There wasn't one video in the top 20 that I would want to watch.

Then why is basically every recommended post on the news feed completely uninteresting garbage. I figured they just used a random function.

What kind of video content is there?

I wonder how much of that has to do with how much FB knows about you and your interests, and your friends and their interests? With YouTube, I honestly don't get any sense that it uses what Google surely knows of me via Search and GMail, e.g. anything related to Chicago, or germane to my political inclinations or personality. Instead, it seems wholly based on my viewing history. Which has some benefits, of course (I get what I click on), except when it makes inferences on outlier activity. e.g. if I click-through to a flat earth conspiracy video for a few curious laughs, it naively thinks I must have an appetite for more.

I've been using FB for more than 10 years and the Facebook Watch recommended videos are absolutely terrible and of no interest to me. So they're not doing a particularly great job as far as I'm concerned.

It's crazy to me how Google almost telepathically guesses what I will search for in all of the web, but it doesn't know what videos I will watch.

YouTube's recommendation algorithm is one of the worst I use. I have to actively manage my subscriptions and many people I know mass click "not interested" on videos to try to improve it. Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, and pretty much every other recommendation works like magic by now.

There's something really wrong with it.

I had a hilarious incident of this with Google Search being on the money and YouTube being so far off the mark it appeared broken. Try searching for "GPL3" and I assume you'll see something similar.

On the other hand, searching for "GPL v3" actually gets relevant YouTube results, so they are out there and YouTube knows how to find them if you ask the right way.

Google Search, Amazon, Netflix-- my guess is there's just have more structured data for these recommendation systems. Amazon and Netflix get high-quality descriptions and information tables about their videos/products, Google Search has to do a bit more digging, but it has the whole text corpus link structure, etc of a site.

Spotify probably has it a bit tougher, but my guess is playlists play a big role as they are curated clustering of similar music (as opposed to just a "folder" to put all videos in a series, like they are on YouTube). Music itself is also probably much easier to analyze than video: extract the BPM and frequencies and you can tell a lot about the composition of type of song it's from. Video on the other hand-- you can do very computationally intensive CV, but that won't tell you much about the mood, meaning, genre, etc. of video something is.

YouTube many times will have to go off a title, a very vague description and a ton of irrelevant comments.

Edit: Actually, they have captions. I'd assume dialogue could give them a lot of relevant information, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> e.g. if I click-through to a flat earth conspiracy video for a few curious laughs, it naively thinks I must have an appetite for more.

Every time I'm about to click on a youtube link / watch an embedded video I ask myself if it's worth influencing my future recommendations - which are not great, but not too far off either. If the content is outside my core interests or music tastes I opt to watch in incognito mode.

I once made the mistake to play Peppa the Pig for my daughter while signed in, and my recommendations became a mess for weeks.

> Every time I'm about to click on a youtube link / watch an embedded video I ask myself if it's worth influencing my future recommendations

I do this all the time. Often, I click on "smart" videos, which I have no intention of watching just in the hope I get better quality content in my "feed". But it's hard to find high quality content, yet it's easy to find mindless dribble.

> it's hard to find high quality content, yet it's easy to find mindless dribble.

+1 to this. I watched a few Super Smash Bros Ultimate compilations at around the time it was released, and got some recommendations. I don't own a Switch so I don't know the game, plus its a novelty, so they caught my curiosity.

I went down a such rabbit-hole of mindless dribble --endless videos of videogame characters punching each other-- I actually tired myself and am no longer considering buying the game/console. It's such mindless consumption.

> Often, I click on "smart" videos, which I have no intention of watching just in the hope I get better quality content in my "feed".

I need to try this.

I once watched a video on how to replace a specific part on my car.

Now Youtube thinks my biggest interest is how to replace and repair every other thing on that same model of car, other models by the same make, etc.

I tried last.fm years ago and had to give up. I was on my phone and read about a Swedish prog rock band, thought about how I could get to hear them and signed up for last.fm there and then. The service used that seed to give me a really fun scandanavian hippy rock experience exploring related bands from Finland, Norway and Denmark. It was great for a while, but then I was trapped. No matter what I did to push the service towards a more balanced assessment of my musical tastes, it kept casting me back into nordic psychdedelia hell.

I've never used FB Watch, but based off this comment I decided to go and see what it played for me.

Video 1: Sheet Pan Chicken Fajita Crunchwrap (recipe video). My comment: I basically never cook and I would never watch a cooking video.

Video 2: "THE NUN PRANK" (some young idiots doing a prank in an underground parking lot). My comment: I find this totally moronic.

Video 3: Banana Bread on a stick (another recipe video). My comment: Zero interest in this.

Video 4: Brave Boy Kills Giant Tiger (looks like a trailer for a cheesy Bollywood kind of movie) My comment: I don't watch this kind of thing at all and have zero interest.

Video 5: "Lilwin" (looks like an amateur video set in Africa with two people speaking an unknown language) My comment: I have no fucking clue why this was recommended to me.

Conclusion: FB watch is total shit.

> I've never used FB Watch

> Conclusion: FB watch is total shit.

Did you expect it to just magically know your preferences?

Are you kidding? Are you somehow suggesting Facebook shouldn't be able to know anything about me given the amount of data they've sucked up over the last decade?

Given I first opened my Facebook account 10 years ago and I've been posting status update and liking various bands and TV shows, I would expect it to be able to have a fair guess of things I might like.

It's recommending videos that aren't even in ENGLISH! I mean, I have "liked" TV shows on Facebook, artists/bands, I've posted about books I've enjoyed, movies I've liked. It knows my age, gender, location, friends, job, etc. You'd think if they were as good at recommending as some people make out they could do a decent job.

There isn't a single piece of content in my top 20 videos I'd want to watch.

It's a joke. If this is the state of their AI recommending tech they need to fire their data scientists.

Wait, are we complaining that Facebook has too much information, or not enough? Seems like they're damned if they do, damned if they don't.

IMHO they are. :^)

That doesn't sound like the argument at all. I read it as, given the vast amount of data they have, the initial suggestions should have been closer to what they might enjoy watching.

Both. They shouldn't have so much info, but since they do, then how come it's not used to make user-facing features work well?

I like how Sabrience got downvoted on first comment then made a super comeback with shockingly good insights.

It seems smart people expect others to read between the lines but when average people can't read between lines, same average people resort to downvoted then finally once smart person explains himself, they take his side

-Facebook is a closed system

-Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it

If both of these are true, the typical person commenting about its evils will have a poor idea of how it's actually used. So someone telling me it's damaging my mental health because of social gratification - I haven't posted anything real-life in years - falls about as flat as someone saying Reddit is a website for sharing weight loss pictures.

There are important points to be made about Facebook but they're lost in the noise.

> -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it

That's a pretty big assumption. People's feelings can and do change based on new information.

I don't think it's an assumption, I think it's a tautology. It's not nicotine; if you're using it you don't feel strongly against it.

I assumed you meant it as an assumption because you said "If both of these are true".

So, more precisely, your point was actually "anyone who had been feeling strongly about it at some arbitrary point in time will have stopped using it by that arbitrary point in time". Yes, that's a bit easier to justify but still quite uncertain (IMO) and also a much weaker statement.

Also, just because the stimulus isn't a molecule it does not follow that it's not biochemical in nature. Physics and biochemistry play a role all the way down. The very notion of "stimulus" depends on where we draw the murky, fuzzy and ultimately arbitrary border between "us" and "the world".

> It's not nicotine

Neither is alcohol, nor is gambling.

To be less facetious, I don't see why the claim that facebook can't possibly be addictive, is so self-evident that it's a tautology. I can understand people having different stances in the debate on whether it's addictive, but denying that there's a debate to be had seems completely misguided.

(Also, there can be reasons other than addiction for people using facebook despite feeling strongly against it — e.g. peer pressure.)

> -Anyone who feels strongly against Facebook will have stopped using it

Please define "strongly".

I know many people who really dislike Facebook, but still use it for business reasons or since their parents, best friend, local community, ... use it to share information or scheduling events.

Seems like a problem that can be seen quite generally as well.

e.g. Movie X is a flop, because it's opening weekend in US is disappointing. Goes on do excellently Worldwide, especially outside opening weekend. Search engine X is a flop, because it's market share in US is negligible. Goes on to have solid user number in China and Germany.

It's probably not helped by the strong desire to link future performance predictions to easily available metrics, and never re-evaluating these. Just because the US has driven growth and profits in the past for X, doesn't mean it always will... but's it good enough for knee jerk reactions that generate views.

Except that Facebook initially had a huge user- and mindshare in the US before crossing over to other countries, so it's expected that Facebook fatigue sets in first in the US before it starts affecting other countries.

In Europe it's the same story for Facebook. I remember Facebook predecessors that had the same "well my parents are on it now and the same idiots keep posting bullshit over and over so I just lurk now and then" moment and none of them is really important anymore. I mean. MySpace is doing better than all of the others, which is about as good as Yahoo!.

> "There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily."

Duh. Facebook starts running the videos as soon as you open the Facebook page. If you open a video and watch it, it'll start a new one in 3-4 seconds. Unless they remove these practices, it is not clear how much of that 20 minutes is due to their aggressive behavior.

I believe Watch is their separate page for video, and not the autoplay videos that show up as you scroll down your feed. It'd seem pretty surprising that consumers would repeatedly click on that page and get tricked into watching a significant amount of content.

If you try to click (because by default it should be "pause") the video the pause it, it'll upsize it and open Facebook watch. Just another trick to annoy you.

Have the 2.3 billion MAU been independently verified and checked for duplicates/triplicates etc? Considering the number of people in the world, the number of people older than 13 and younger than 75, the number of active internet users and the penetration in richer countries, I seriously doubt these numbers. Turns out, others are doubting it as well: https://mashable.com/article/report-claims-half-facebook-mau...

So why is everyone uncritically peddling these numbers?

Because many of us profit by turning a blind eye. Most all companies fudge sub numbers for investors. It is fraud and should be treated that way.

How would you verify and check 2.3bn entries for duplicates? I don't think there's a reliable way to get to the real number of users. Names can be similar, IP addresses used by many accounts, etc. Not sure how you'd identify duplicates without a lot of false positives.

You're right that pundits, and that not that those of the US, are bad at following trends and successes in other countries.

However the Economist had an interesting take on Facebooks success outside the US: Their sales outside the US is equivalent to that of a medium size biscuit maker.

So is Watch successful because 400 million people use it, or does it also generate substantial profit for Facebook?

> Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they’ll tell you that it’s a content wasteland, a flop

Maybe. For me personally I’m just not interested.

To me it seems like yet another “me too” feature which Facebook has copied from instagram or Snapchat or whoever did it first. Not to mention I don’t care about this feature on the other platforms either.

The feature itself just looks like a desperate attempt at trying to show that they are still “innovating” their fairly stagnant platforms, just for the sake of innovating.

And here Facebook looks even more desperate in plainly “me too” copying this non-feature.

That's nice, but the discussion was on business value. And for a business value individual opinions from tech-savy people are not that relevant.

Not that I would trust Facebook's numbers considering the amount of lying and shady practices they employ.

I wonder, will this large part of Facebook users that still uses the platform (and Watch) eventually migrate to Instagram as well (as most of North America and Europe appear to have done?). Or does the standard Facebook actually better cater to a large part of the world's population than Instagram?

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