Hacker News Reader

Comment by TameAntelope | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if the analogy holds, considering most of the complaints around social media are that it's not accessible or open enough, and engagement with social media doesn't directly create value for Facebook. They derive that value from the associated ads, as opposed to the items you listed being a) costly for its users, and b) the actual product. Social media costs nothing.

View on HN

Nobody is complaining about it not being open enough. Time on site and amount of content you view is the driver of most of their revenue. Their business is fundamentally constrained by the number of users they have and the waking hours of the ones that are on the platform. To grow they can either recruit more users or build an engaging enough product to get their user to pick it instead of youtube/netflix/tiktok/work/family.

As you mentioned, their customers are advertisers, "users" are there to serve them.

EDIT: before you make the same argument as you made in your reply to another comment, I don't use any Facebook related products and deleted my facebook account over 10 years ago.

I'd also suggest you look into some writing on the attention economy and whales in gaming. All ad supported media is in a race to the bottom to compete for your time. There's a reason why news look like reality shows now.

A good article about how some groups are dealing with the fact that Facebook isn't open enough (for them):

https://restofworld.org/2021/homegrown-facebook-for-the-far-...

Everyone has their pet issue with Facebook. For some, it's lack of openness. For others, Facebook is too open. Everyone seems to have an opinion about which lines Facebook is and isn't allowed to cross, and for every group it's a slightly different set of lines, for a slightly different set of reasons.

My point is that nobody is correct -- Facebook isn't the cultural monolith it is because of its actions, but because of the actions of our global culture. If you want to be angry at someone, look in the (societal) mirror.

I don't care about them being too open or not. My issue is with them pushing sensational content because it's good for their bottom line. IMHO Alex Jones should have a place to post his male enhancement promotional videos, but if a platform is curating the content and decides to recommend it to everyone because it increases time on site and engagement then they should be responsible for that choice.

I have a consumer app and met with some of the early investors in the top social media companies. They all only cared about DAU/MAU, time in app and user growth. All of them recommended books like Hooked (https://medium.com/startup-grind/nir-eyal-why-you-are-addict...), to help us design something that's more addictive, or anything from BJ Fogg (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/10...), who had founders of Instagram and Snapchat as his students. A few of them even tried to get us to hire the new hot thing, Dopamine Labs (https://www.builtinla.com/2018/01/11/dopamine-labs-boost-use...), who promised to have "AI" to get users addicted with custom notifications.

I used to think that behavioral psychology was bullshit (my GF studied psychology too), but being exposed to it in the industry there's no denying that some of it works. There's a reason why all headlines are clickbait now and all thumbnails on youtube and netflix are of weird facial expressions (https://www.avclub.com/why-does-everyone-on-youtube-make-the...). It turns out even the color of your app icon can make an impact on how noticeable it is, leading to more downloads and usage (https://uplandsoftware.com/localytics/resources/blog/tips-fo...)

> engagement with social media doesn't directly create value for Facebook.

Yes it absolutely does. They get value by showing ads. If you're staring at facebook for 4 hours a day, that's a lot more ads than if you log in for 2 minutes and then log back out.

The cigarette comparison is being used a lot, so it's more like if Philip Morris was paid for every drag someone takes. Getting folks hooked, smoking a pack a day or more, is going to generate more revenue than not getting folks hooked. If cigarettes weren't addictive, would P.M. make billions of dollars every year?

I think you missed the word "directly" in what you quoted from me. If Facebook directly made money off of engagement, people would pay for the Facebook service. The extra step of "sell ad space to advertisers" makes engagement an indirect money maker.

Philip Morris doesn't make money every drag someone takes, that's exactly my point. It's different.

Also, cigarettes are bad for you in any quantity. Social media is not obviously bad for you in any quantity, it's the knock on effects of being constantly aware of what your peer group is achieving and how you react to that which creates problems (among other indirect issues ultimately caused by your decisions related to social media, not the social media itself).

> Philip Morris doesn't make money every drag someone takes, that's exactly my point. It's different.

I see. You're right that it was an imperfect comparison.

Philip Morris makes _more_ money by addicting its users. Facebook makes _more_ money by addicting its users.

I think social media being bad for you is a nebulous concept. I would argue that, since I stopped using Facebook and Reddit (and only use HN on work-breaks), I've been able to maintain my environment and thereby my well-being on an order that I was not previously able to.

Eating a peanut M&M isn't _bad_ for me, but if they were addicting, it would be a lot harder to consume a non-harmful number of them.

Stab wounds aren't inherently lethal, but enough of them will be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com