Facebook loses users for the first time
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Meta shares drop 20% on Q4 earnings miss, weak outlook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30185214 - Feb 2022 (436 comments)
Almost all activity online has shifted away from the Social Graph to a Content Graph. Almost nobody wants to see what their friends are doing online anymore. In a lot of ways it can be cringey. People just want the latest, catchiest content. TikTok and Youtube are the OGs here, but it's everywhere when you start to look. Twitter timeline changes being an awkward but working example. Discovery > Static friends list.
The entire premise FB was founded on is eroding. This isn't just Apple privacy and some regulatory strangulation. It's seismic to the business. The reason most people are still going to Facebook is incompatible with their primary activities online which is: consuming content from people-you-don't-know.
Facebook is where you find out your highschool friend is super in to a MLM, your uncle has drastic political views you don't share, and that your historical social class and network is largely irrelevant to your life a decade later.
They are doing everything they can to try to move in this direction, but the more they push it the less useful Facebook is for the average user. Instagram's discovery page is a prime example. But Reels are less good than TikTok, and whatever they are doing for short form video in Facebook is surely a hopeless game of catch up. This is classical innovator's dilemma.
The very idea that Zuckerberg straight up said they need to copy the competition harder is incomprehensible considering the resources they have.
They are going to try to do a few things. One is to anti-trust Apple (in the media at least), and the other is to hand wave (Metaverse).
The reason the Metaverse was such a non sequitur is that it is so clearly a last minute thrust coming out of the C-Suite. If you've ever worked at a highly visible tech pubco, you've seen this happen before. Weak quarters mean that product announcements get pushed up. When it is as all encompassing as the Metaverse announcement, you know something is up.
This is probably the most accurate description of Facebook I've seen.
"HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who never left our hometown & thinks Olive Garden is fancy. Anyway, here's a racist article."
The stereotype is orthogonal to class.
Is this a slur for my kind?
Classical guitar teacher here. I'd never have been able to buy the house I'm writing this from on my salary if not for also prostituting myself in the it sector :-)
District attorneys don't necessarily get paid well, but they are pretty high up in local social class.
The joke is not from a journalist.
The joke was copied widely when originally posted, and it wasn't clear to me who wrote it in the first place -- but if I was going to reference it here, I wanted to give proper credit.
I found a story in the WaPo about online joke plagiarism, and it used this joke as an example -- and cited musician Kevin Farzad as the original author. Based on this, I credited him in my comment accordingly.
It's funny because it's something many, many people identify with. A good chunk of Americans with the ability to do so leave small, provincial areas they grew up in for better opportunities in larger, more diverse cities. This leads to a pretty huge disconnect between them and those who, for whatever reason, stayed in their hometown.
It wasn't something that you noticed as much until Facebook exploded, and then everyone got re-connected with people from high school that, in some cases, you'd neither seen nor thought about in 20 years. And then the sort of post that prompted the joke happens, and you see it clearly.
And I assure you, as someone who grew up in and later left arguably the MOST racist state in the US south, the articles these archetypes are sharing are often quite explicit in their racism.
Many don't optimize their life their lives around "better opportunities" and "diverse cities". It sounds like you do, and good for you.
You DO realize that it's not at the expense of MERELY staying in a small, provincial, homogeneous place, right? It's ALSO continuing to embrace the blinkered worldview that growing up in such a place engenders. You need both for the joke to land.
You're reacting here as thought it's JUST about moving away (or not). It isn't.
I know educated, open-minded people who stayed in my hometown who have grown personally and intellectually and morally since youth. They stayed there for a handful of reasons, and some of them are as you state: an inability or unwillingness to be more than an hour from family, for example.
But I know of far more people who have not advanced in any meaningful way since they were 18 or 20. They often find the VERY IDEA of a world beyond the hometown to be fishy and untrustworthy. They are, uniformly, uncritical consumers of Fox News. They are the ones posting racist memes about, say, the Obamas, or proudly touting their COVID vax refusenik status.
This is who the joke is about.
Of course there is nothing wrong with thinking OG is fancy and so on. Better to avoid folks who make a big deal out of it IMO.
"largely irrelevant to your life a decade later."
hey, 2013 was about a decade ago, you nailed it
The friend's perception of the poster would be "HEY IT'S ME your facebook friend from high school who went to New York and thinks is better than you. Anyway, here's a woke article."
I think it matters largely because I don’t believe that most people just want content. Everyone I speak with who uses FB on a daily basis has made the decision to excuse the habit purely because they are interested in keeping in touch with people. But by excusing that habit, they end up mostly consuming content because that’s what the feed gives them.
I left FB the day their “timeline” stopped supporting chronological sort.
The original argument was that Facebook is failing to keep up with the times, hence why the back-home losers are still using it while you, the successful urban-dweller, have moved on.
Your argument that Facebook is “a pipeline to deliver brain poison” has a lot more value, even if only because it’s more objective.
the increasing hew and cry suggests that it actually is
When everyone is still actively building their friend list (remember this started for college students) its an amazing product because it brings you closer to people in a new way and allows for curation without investing a ton into AI/ML.
For people who stay in a static social bubbles for long times (e.g., your parents, your friends from HS who didn't move to a coastal city) it's also perfect, because they tend to value content related to their social group more than something new and interesting.
But for the highest value users (e.g., the ones with high-paying knowledge-based jobs and a willingness to try new things) the social graph will never keep up with their lives. Bad content from the edges of the graph will slowly creep into feeds (MLMs being a prime example) and those high-value users will seek out new platforms that conform better to their interests.
Instagram was a brilliant stop-gap, but Mark never saw the writing on the wall about algorithmic content (probably b/c Bytedance had the advantage of cutting its teeth in China first) and is just too far behind to ever really catch up.
So now he's trying to out-future Bytedance with VR (and even got them to burn $1bn on Pico), but unless he has some hard-tech rabbit to pull out of his hat, there's just not anything there.
We may very well be seeing the largest (negative) turn-around story in history since Yahoo! play out in front of our eyes.
They already have, and if the US Government would allow them to make another acquisition over $1bn, they already would have (I guarantee 5 different Biz Dev associates have made very long PowerPoints about Roblox and Rec Room only to be told the idea is DOA).
It's actually kind of amazing that Mark's off-putting personality and desire to remain the face of the company is what will kill it (let's just hope Aaron Sorkin stays alive long enough for the sequel, because it might rival Citizen Kane).
Unlike high attention media with placement and interstitial opportunities, Marketplace and Groups are not great business models.
Why do they have to be non-religious?
Perhaps I'm just an outlier, but it's the same with Twitter for me. I use it more these days than I did some years ago, but I also use it mostly like an RSS feed. I follow video game devs, musicians, etc. so I can be kept in the loop on the latest releases and whatnot.
I think you make a good point about content graph. I think there is some truth to that, although I have never really taken any interest in anything but the kind of content that YouTube offers.
I don’t mind the marketplace architecture, it’s quite nice actually. But Groups is the absolute worst place to house former forum content because it’s just not indexed well. There a few groups that I’m in that are managed really well, which gives them ~60% the utility of a tradition forum still.
What I’ve done on FB is aggressively unfollowed every single friend and page that I don’t care about. My feed is now strictly a feed of group posts from people I don’t know about my hobbies that I enjoy…it’s actually quite nice!
Coincidentally the profiling is also extremely useful for political leverage and behaviour mod. I'm sure that never occurred to anyone around the company, and the links to operations like AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica are incidental among the ad noise.
The incoming anti-trust cases are going to be interesting.
The value of ____ might be "seeing pictures of family", or it might be "coordination of/participation in a group that has settled on Facebook as the easiest path" (<-- this is me), or it might be "professionally necessary to be there" or a number of other things.
But none of these are positive reasons. There is no love of Facebook behind any of them. It's Facebook being tolerated. This is bad for Meta.
This is probably good for society at large, though. Or at least I hope it will be.
My neighborhood exclusively uses Facebook for neighborhood communication.
My kid's school PTA exclusively uses Facebook.
Most of the local food trucks only post their schedules on Facebook.
Since the pandemic started I have been taking the opportunity to go through my house and clean out lots of things that have just been hanging around for years. I list everything I sell on Facebook, Craigslist, OfferUp, and Nextdoor. I can’t remember the last time I got a bite from any of the other services that aren't Facebook. It’s been awhile.
It honestly drives me be crazy how this company has wormed their way into being such an essential piece of communication infrastructure for so many people that I can’t quit without sacrificing my ability to participate in some of the things I really enjoy.
So I begrudgingly tolerate Facebook.
>Most of the local food trucks only post their schedules on Facebook.
Oh, god, that's annoying. I've actually seen some businesses forgo a proper web site and instead JUST USE FB, which is crazy annoying.
Do people really participate in something like school PTA and eat often at food trucks?
I guess electronic platforms are more fragmented here in Europe. Google Maps owns business hours, various classified sites (such as Ebay's) own selling stuff locally. But everything might be different in each country really.
I think people have become more vary to post personal things online. I know very little parents that would be okay to publish pictures of their kids online (including on Facebook).
* lost and found (including pets)
* HOA announcements
* changes to the trash pickup schedule, special trash collections, etc
* other events (Santa parade)
* new neighbor introductions
* recommendations (repairs, babysitting, dog sitting)
* free stuff or stuff for sale
* general advice on house construction (many houses are similar)
It’s not important per se, and not everyone is in the group. But it does come in handy.
Yes, parents often participate in PTAs. Parent engagement is a big deal in education.
Yes, in many places in the US there are food trucks. People often enjoy them. Finding out where a given truck will be on Tuesday is useful!
Businesses generally keep Facebook pages in the US, usually as a supplement to a real web site, but also because Facebook has traditionally been where everyone is already.
I have a few Facebook friends that refuse to post pictures of their kids on Facebook. I also have a LOT of friends that post nothing but.
Would love some feedback on if you think it would help solve communications from: 1) PTA -> resident 2) Food Trucks -> nearby people
Is facebook trending in that direction? Seems like it.
Maybe too pessimistic.
I quit Facebook years ago and do not miss anything either, so maybe it's just me.
1) Remove the apps from your phone and log out on mobile browser, making each future login a concentrated intentional effort. (You can leave Messenger if that might be used for emergency contacts).
2) Use www version only.
3) Choose a time when you're going to sit by your home computer, and use social media for some pre-determined time slot, let's say 30 minutes.
The social networks are very good at serving this use case - showing most important content first, and relegating the junky stuff further down the feed. This way you won't miss any baby photos or wedding announcements, but will be spared from your uncle getting into a heated political discussion.
Only up to a point. I have actually missed wedding announcements because the announcement was pushed far down by more recent but less relevant news. Yes, if you use Facebook for 30 minutes a day, you probably won't miss anything. But if you use Facebook less often than that (like an hour a week, or once a month), you will absolutely miss relevant news because it'll be pushed down by whatever political shoutfest is currently drawing comments and reactions.
Which I'm sure is complete coincidence and not at all intended to draw you into using Facebook every second of every hour of every day
My son's daycare has a facebook page. It's very convenient to stay up to date on my own schedule without having to deal with emails. My pizzeria also has a facebook page. It's an easy way to look up hours or any updates. My gym has an instagram page to post their workouts and schedule. It's very convenient. The owners aren't very tech savvy so its easy for them. And its easy for me because the website isn't broken, gives me everything I need, lets me comment or reach out to the owners and is well indexed
It's like saying "I wouldn't use product if not for the value I get from the product".
They try to make you think they invented the wheel but really they’re just offering the same services as elsewhere under their umbrella.
I deleted it anyway. Deleting facebook didn't change my real world in anyway.
I believe the reason Instagram, Snapchat, and now TikTok grew the way they did was because the parents weren't on those apps. Even now we see that young people migrate to other platforms as their parents start paying attention to the current one.
I don’t want to buy the next card game booster pack in any way or form. I don’t care about theme parks I’ve never heard of, or the new game that lets me save a half naked hottie. And for that matter I also won’t change for a new car insurance.
Now, someone in my life pushing for the formers might force my hand.
Acquisitions are a critical instrument for large corporations in terms of competition. TikTok's parent, ByteDance, is not restricted by such problems despite how massive they are, for example.
ByteDance is a $400 billion market cap company that doesn't have to play the game the same way Facebook does despite the fact that they're clearly competing in the same tier of scale now.
And that's not a statement of woe-is-Facebook, nobody should feel bad for Facebook, it's just the fact of the real context they're stuck with and their giant competitor is not.
Don’t forget the US came perilously close to banning TikTok last year. As much as Facebook probably doesn’t have the US government on their side, it’s more on their side that TikTok’s.
I think Facebook just got burned by not having a hardware platform this cycle - Apple and Google control the phones and Microsoft has the PC, XBox etc. They just want control over the next big hardware platform.
Whether that's a reasonable bet or not who knows? But I wouldn't be as dismissive of their ambitions in the space.
It's wild that FB has become such a highly valued company despite the fact that they have always been resting on rather shaky foundations.
We can also start to see Goodhart's Law in action at scale. Running your company by constantly optimizing for metrics (as so many startups mimic now) eventually does catch up to you. The vitriolic content that initially got them massive engagement eventually gets more and more people repulsed by the service.
In the end, just like MySpace and Friendster, there is nothing that really prevents users from exiting from the platform extremely fast once the tide of the network effect turns the other way.
I think it started a slow bleed when they removed the chronological view. After that it became “evil” and not about social connection anymore. No longer was my post being seen by my friends unless the algo thought it was saucy enough. It was a great business but I dont think you’ll ever get the people who are fed up to come back.
FB, as a social platform, is moving away from being a social app. Same thing happened to other social apps. The original utility they had in the early days was subsumed by social, which is now being subsumed by something else. The original utility can't be found anywhere... it was dragged down into the depths and drowned.
In some ways, my iPhone now is less useful to me than it was before. I can look things up in the moment, but in terms of connecting me to my past activities -- not so much.
What does 'hand wave' mean in this context?
Thanks, @libsoftiktok.
There are mountains of quality information online and while I would absolutely resent having to grow up in the age of social media, the kids are way better at parsing and questioning rapid onslaughts of information because of the tribulations there.
They get caught up for a while, but the guise wears away. Young people can easily see outside their immediate world, and any adopted worldview, unlike we've ever known. When I was growing up that meant a lonely kid wandering down to the library to flip through magazines from the big city to inject some new ideas into one's world. Now, young people from anywhere can dig into the most arcane of information and worldviews in seconds and begin integrating them earlier on in their lives.
The world will look very different in outlook in a short amount of time, and it will not be for the sake of "content". Just gimme some truth, all I want is some truth.
User growth in the US may be flat but earnings per US/CA active user is up which implies that the value is here and growing for users in the US/CA
Fact. I unfollowed pretty much every person connected to me on facebook, and now my feed consists primarily of posts from 'This cat is C H O N K Y', 'Foods with threatening auras,' and the like. Huge quality of life improvement, second only to basically never using Facebook at all.
I mean to say that a change of editorial policy in a given media outlet is often related to a change of political direction; is that the case?
Funny aspect: big tech wants to obtan some real influence and weight in society, so they introduce more censorship as a means of obtaining this weight. Now incidentially this erodes their base, as their clients loose interest in the toy, and start to use something else instead.
You know, like your on-demand TV channel that knows what you want, already.
That doesn’t seem that eerie to me. Your partner is most likely logging in from the same IP, and perhaps your mother-in-law has done the same at least once, or is friended to your partner. Making this association is pretty straightforward
Zuckerberg got lucky and then executed brilliantly, transitioned from nerd hacker to CEO amazingly well. He deserves a lot of credit for that.
Since then, Facebook have innovated very little. Zuckerberg recognised this, and bought Instagram and Whatsapp in lieu of building an innovative company. The latter is clearly really difficult to do.
Without a stream of new ideas and products (unlike, say, Apple) Facebook double-downed on maximising revenue growth from their core advertising business. This led to all the scandals and disasters they have brought us, including destabilising societies.
Inevitably, this led to the core product becoming less attractive, and people were also turned off by the negative press. Zuckerberg's rigid control of the company has led to him being a lightening rod for the backlash against big tech and especially adtech. His media skills are awful, so insisting on control and making himself a figurehead has further damaged the business.
Zuckerberg knows the only way out is another home run. He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play. It looks like the timeline for VR won't be short enough to save FB, but even if it were arriving soon enough he must know that FB probably isn't capable of delivering a truly new thing.
This then marks the beginning of the end for the company, as it continues to bring in revenue from Instagram and monetises Whatsapp. Its sheer size means decline is going to take decades.
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg leaves in the next few years, before the failure of Meta strategy becomes apparent.
What they _should_ have done is debatable, but developing some sense of ethics might have helped. I think they could have focused on building Whatsapp into a payments (etc) app, which would have created an enduring product, and then used the time that bought them to rebuild the company.
Microsoft are showing that it can be done, but I wonder if Facebook has the capacity to do great things. Perhaps the lesson from MS is that only a new leader can rescue such a mired company.
Essentially Zuckerberg is fast forwarding the future so he’ll have place to sell ads in without a 3rd part like Apple setting the rules.
This is also why he goes full VR and not AR which would likely require a phone somewhere on the side.
I find your analysis excellent apart from this bit. It’s really far from obvious to me that VR has any future outside a gaming niche.
Primary improvements in OQ2 over previous headsets: Higher Quality + Lower Price + More Portable.
Very easy for me to believe if you just keep improving in those areas you end up with a device that will be present in every lower-middle-class+ household.
VR is one of those things that’s really fun to use at your friend’s house, but not something you want to use daily.
The Quest(2) is not tethered but has the "gaming PC" built inside of it, no need to bolt lighthouses to your living room walls, and has the frictionless ecosystem polish of the PS/X-box. So it sits charging on my couch, always updating itself and the games in the background, and when I have 10 minutes of boredom during WFH, I can slip it on my head and will instantly resume the last game state I was on, no cables, no PC, no maintaining or curating drivers and SW, none of that stuff. Zero friction. And I can also put it in my backpack and take it to a friend's place instead of having the whole setup bolted to my living room.
I also had work colleagues with gaming PCs buy the Index and return it in the 30 day window after getting bored of the nuisance of cables and SW, then buy a Quest 2 and keep it.
The Quest absolutely killed the Index for the mainstream VR market and got Valve to move in the same direction.
It definitely is not (saying as a PC gamer for over 15 years). If you don't already use your gaming PC regularly for other stuff so that the whole loading, update and maintenance is part of the daily experience anyway, then, you first have to fire up the gaming PC, wait for it to load, login to Windows, then you might have Windows nagging you for an update, then maybe Nvidia gaming hub or whatever they're calling it nowadays nags you for an update, then maybe you have to reboot, then open the steam launcher, then maybe that also want some updates, then fire up the game, then you have to clear your surrounding environment to make room for the cable tether and make sure you don't trip on it, then put on the Index, then finally you can play.
To most people that wohle ritual gets annoying and puts off the casual gamers who want a quick gaming session every now and then without dealing with any of that crap. The Quest is literally just put on and go since it's just like a console, which is also more popular for gaming than PCs for the convenience and the lack of friction.
In my mind it’s a novelty you will be far more productive without.
>And you can’t use your phone, have something on in the background, etc.
I don't get what you meant here.
My favorite VR experience was actually a game that wasn’t designed for VR but sort of serendipitously worked extremely well (Elite: Dangerous). Space dogfights in VR are incredible and super-immersive. It still gave me a headache after a bit of playtime but I usually pushed through until my ship was out of ammo and I needed to reload.
But after playing E:D in VR, most VR native games like Space Pirate Simulator, Beat Saber or Superhot VR just feel like shallow toys. E:D is closer to an immersive experience than any of them; I actively wanted to stay in VR longer but my eyes would not let me.
> I don't get what you meant here.
I meant that it’s hard to simultaneously perform VR and non-VR activities (or switch back and forth between them quickly).
Windows updates don't prompt anymore. They download automatically and apply at the next reboot. Steam starts at boot and updates every thing in the background. Never had an Nvidia popup, don't use anything else than a driver for my GPU. As soon as you put on the headset and turn on the controllers it wakes up, starts SteamVR and you can play. I don't care how long you've been a PC gamer in the past. The time that gaming on Windows was a chore is long gone. Stuff just works on Windows now.
Which barrier? People can game twice a month due to lack of time, not because of a barrier from the device. And those two times a month they have the time to game, they want to jump into the game directly, not do OS/driver/game updates first.
That's one of the reasons the Quest destroyed the Valve index in sales and why consoles are more popular then PCs for gaming.
"Consumers don't want it, but they will use it anyways, because Apple/whoever said so"
(Avatar as the single exception)
2 kids movies
1 animated movie
some short but interesting documentaries.
(horror movies runner up (mostly resident evil lol)
Not exactly market crushing content.
Did you see the Great Gatsby? Did you see it in 3D? It was almost like the sober examination of the unrestrained materialism and absent moral center of the roaring 20s jumped right out at you.
Someone who spends 1-2 hours a day using Oculus, I wholeheartedly disagree.
And also yeah, VR porn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Aix8NuU8pE is relevant LOL.
I can't remember who it was - maybe Stratechery - that theorized that Zuckerberg thanks to his experience running Facebook had a really good intuition for when Social media where going to go far and thus was able to make deals that at first looked wildly overpriced but in the end seemed to be a steal.
Perhaps their problem right now is that there hasn't been a social media with the growth potential that has been worth their acquiring.
At any rate not sure if I would say just because they failed one time (even with scandals of last few years) that they're really in trouble, that strikes me too much like most financial journalism that says oh no company X had a bad quarter that's it they're toast and then it turns out they come back the next quarter. I say that as someone who does not care for Facebook or any of their acquisitions (although lots in my family like Whatsapp)
I wonder how much survivorship bias there is here. Presumably they've made some truly dreadful acquisitions too?
https://www.techwyse.com/blog/infographics/facebook-acquisit...
EDIT: and Oculus, too
It kind of helps when you use a VPN called Onavo to spy on what apps people are using...
> He's a super smart and prescient thinker, so he can see VR is a good play
He made a school yearbook on the internet and copied some features from existing social networks like MySpace. Facebook was just in the right place at the right time and executed well.
The jury is very much still out on whether "VR is a good play", too. It might turn out to be a gigantic over-marketed gimmick like blockchain has.
Having said that, I’m also skeptical of the whole metaverse thing, as we had that stuff a long time ago already (Second Life) and it was a flop. VR needs to become extremely ubiquitous and hassle-free for such a thing to work.
A flop? I remember watching a documentary a while back saying some people were totally addicted to it. I'm not sure if they're still afloat these days, though. Might go the way of Playstation Home (which I genuinely liked!).
not necessarily a good thing
My Quest 2 doesn't give me motion sickness at all but I am susceptible to motion sickness when someone is driving/flying or on a boat. Still, two very distinct things that make a very different statistic.
It seems probable that motion sickness in VR will be less of a problem in the future as technology and techniques improve. Most people seem to be able to cope with it at the current level.
I’d say getting around has more utility than being in the metaverse.
I think you're wrong in saying there's a limit when it comes to AR.
Our smartphones are AR devices, a poorly interfaced cybernetic extension. It's a cumbersome device yet unimaginably successful.
This poor AR device has constraints that will always hamper it. It must be of a certain size to display anything useful/readable and to be a useful touch-operated device.
If people put up with this poor device and it's slow information delivery, due to the poor human-computer interface, then they sure as hell will put up with AR devices of the future.
This new wave of AR need not have near as hampering constraints.
AR has the potential to be more successful than the modern smartphone when products are as uncumbersome, lightweight and comfortable to wear as regular glasses/sunglasses, while having the technical specs to augment reality with razor sharp and useful 2D and 3D overlays, and sound.
I see no reason people will be more reluctant to put on a pair of sunglasses than carry an iPhone in their pocket or purse.
Then there are other AR product forms, like contact lenses.
AR has a wide host of useful applications, both civilian, social (recreational), military, engineering, medicine, etc. That's not the future, for most of these branches it is already in great use. There's a ton of R&D going on in this space.
I agree. I disagree however that VR is already here. It isn’t, not even close. And it will keep getting further away as we push for higher resolution and higher frame rate displays.
I think there needs to be some way to power this thing all day long. Maybe Apple was onto something with its Apple Watch strategy. Create a minimally viable product and only introduce new features very slowly so you can still claim all day battery life in a happy path. Tl;dr I don’t think the limiting factor is VR itself but rather how do we power it. I don’t want something on my head that I have to charge every fifteen minutes.
This seems far-fetched to me.
Mojo (https://spectrum.ieee.org/ar-in-a-contact-lens-its-the-real-...) claims to be on track for this, but:
- their "working demo" is apparently not actually wearable
- it has no built-in battery -- if I have to wear an inductive charger around my eye, I may as well wear smart glasses, right?
- the whole thing has a bit of a Theranos feel about it
I'm skeptical.
Surely the fact that this is exactly what happened with earlier product releases must count as a reason... And come on, AR contact lenses? In what century exactly? If you think that's what's going to rescue Meta, I've got some FB I'd like to (short) sell you.
It's an interesting thing to say because, one of the pending killer apps for VR is liberating us from our clunky rectangular meatworld screens that can't travel with us. It's still too low resolution now in affordable hardware, but it's at a tipping point and it is going to be quite exciting to see it cross that. I wouldn't rule out that in 5 years from now, a sizeable percentage of the professional computing workforce is using VR just for this reason alone.
The VR office is probably going to be open concept, like a bunch or chairs in a room.
I am never wearing a VR headset all day to save space. The day this rolls out I am asking for an exception for real monitors.
I honestly don't think this is ever going to happen though. Everyone is just caught up in this hype cycle.
VR shuts you off from the world, and only permits you to interact with people digitally. My view is this is only ever going to be a niche play for gaming and some commerce (e.g architecture, game design).
AR on the other hand at its most minimal is a set of specs, and you only seeing reality. Nothing has to be always on, as someone who wears glasses this is my current world. Now introduce the ability to insert virtual objects (e.g a virtual computer screen) and my world is a little bit better. Wire it together so people can share the augment, and possibilities become limitless.
Alastair Reynolds wrote a good series of books (Blue Remembered Earth) where AR was envisioned rather extensively and it was compelling. As such I view AR as the future of all computing and the market correspondingly huge.
If they are betting the company on VR and a "metaverse" then maybe they have reached a cap on unique users already and the growth of FB is done.
Not everything has to be a household name to be considered a success. Second life is very niche and very successful.
Metaverse is not a utopia but a dystopia!
edit: typo
While the image quality and frame rate have improved, there are still fundamental limitations on the technology. One common pushback is that some people will get headaches due to scanning the scene, trying to focus on objects at their false depths.
3D film is a pain, way more than double the work. So most 3D content actually was made 3D in post rather than filming with multiple cameras.
Still, the way you would frame a scene to be 'interesting' in 3D is different from how you would do so in 2D. This usually results in being able to 'tell' whether a movie you are watching was primarily made for one market or another.
VR adds something other than image quality - it adds the ability to be immersed in the content. However you still have the same issues:
- So far, we don't have consumer headsets that enable you to actually focus on the objects in the scene. For example, you can't hold a piece of paper up to your face to read the fine print. - Trying to capture certain kinds of media is infeasibly expensive in VR, both from a post-production cost perspective and a data size expectation. Live action basically is too difficult.
The latest incarnation of 3D movies were in a sense a clever business maneuver - it created a premium tier of movie experience and got many theaters to start upgrading their older projection equipment and screens to newer digital alternatives.
For home use, 3D movies were weird because they didn't follow the traditional hype curve. A lot of early adoption was by families, where unfortunately the shutter glasses still tended to be too expensive for young hands. But that market has the same thing - manufacturers will eventually take technology and reduce it down to cost, so how can you compel people to buy the newest fancy screen where you still have a good margin?
Note several television manufacturers are now trying to proceed advertising and sales revenue, which is why smart TVs have now taken over - a 15-30% cut on a HBO Max subscription adds up to real money quickly over their typically poor margins on the sale of the set.
If the Metaverse means I can watch hatespeech + antivaxx posts, pictures of peoples lunch on a 3D canvas or cat videos, I pass.
I can confirm that it was.
So has VR a couple of times in the history of computer based entertainment, so the analogy hold IMO.
> VR adds something other than image quality - it adds the ability to be immersed in the content
Exactly. And it needs content that is noticeably improved by VR without obvious disadvantages, and there have been few examples of where the benefit has been enough to counter the faf. I've played a bit of Elite with an expensive VR setup and it was great but that doesn't hit the movement issue as being sat in a fixed place matches the immersion requirement of the largest part of the game (being sat in a cockpit), and I'm told Half-Life: Alyx is good enough that the constraints imposed by VR don't impact the immersion enough to break it. But those are the only two examples I can cite: you need people like me (a techie who doesn't game much at all these days despite doing so a lot a decade or two ago) and the less techie public to be able to identify more than two or three great examples for the product to have any hope of being more than niche. This isn't just a technology gap (between what we can do now and what people see on TV with things like the holodeck) but also an issue of making suitable content good enough is more difficult to get right.
No. I remember TV companies pushing it since it was cheap for them to include and they hoped people would think of it as the "Next Big Thing", but consumers and especially reviewers during the aughts saw right through it.
Even in the 90's I remember it being seen as a short-lived novelty more than anything: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-05-02-970502...
Regardless what you think of VR I think there are clearly far more bulls than 3D TV ever had.
Blockchain is IMO in a much much much more questionable state of relevancy and usefulness than VR.
Why?
I workout in VR (supplemental workouts by playing Eleven Table Tennis to the max).
I boardgame in VR (Demeo).
My GF picks up my headset and plays Beatsaber.
You can have multiple screens in VR. While I'm not the biggest fan of them, I will be if I'd travel to another country, not being able to bring my monitors.
Oh, and I've convinced quite a few of my friends to do the same (workout, gaming, productivity).
VR is already here mate. People game, people exercise, people get new experiences by watching VR videos (I got better at skiing because of it), people are using its productivity apps to design stuff (think about designing game in Unreal Engine using VR). There are certain use-cases in which VR outperforms anything else (and in most use-cases it doesn't).
VR has tons of uses!
It's not perfect by any means, but we're slowly getting there. 4000x4000 per eye is the hallmark I will be patiently waiting for. Better omni-directional threadmills are something I will hope for. We already are beginning to have haptic feedback suits from owo. I'm not a fan of haptic feedback suits, but others are.
VR is here to stay. It won't replace anything, it will augment how we are going about our daily stuff.
Whereas with blockchain, well, it's mostly used for speculation and I still haven't seen people use it as a legitimate currency. And this includes myself! Like, I used bitcoin to buy a bitcoin wallet, but does that count? I don't think so. The current use of blockchain in terms of cryptocurrencies is speculation (at the moment) and I am hoping it will change, but I wonder if it ever will. And I am a fan of the whole thing, but let's not kid ourselves. I hope the unbanked will use it. I hope people in super high inflationary countries will use it (because as volatile is bitcoin is, it beats any currency with hyper inflation). Unfortunately, I don't have any insights on the unbanked.
I'd claim that VR will be niche until it becomes AR. When I can see my keyboard and get multiple floaty screens,that will be productivity. Pokemon Go in AR? Skyrim AR? AR shooters in converted warehouses? Horror games in my house? That'll be games.
Practicing without the weight of impact of a club/racket is good.
Its niche but definitely a new dawn for gaming. FB might be too early but they're in the right space.
The Quest 2 supports the magic keyboard and has multiple screens in the home screen.
Have you played Eleven Table Tennis? Have you played Thrill of the Fight? That's exercise right there!
Pre-covid we had a bar that accepted BTC using Lightning Network :(
And that assumes they aren't using one of those services that accepts BTC and automatically converts it to USD at the time of the sale.
This is the problem with VR. It started the adoption process the wrong way - instead of positioning itself as a work enabling tool that you buy for a killer feature - it's just a gimmicky toy that has reasonable stigma around it among normal people (non-techies).
If your phone was just a 1000$ gaming handheld it would be a niche product, at best something like a 3DS. But gaming is the biggest market on phones.
Likewise if VR ever wanted to get mainstream adoption it needed to have a killer feature like enabling ultra portable/productive workspaces. Imagine everyone working from home buying a 500$ VR headset for remote work - totally reasonable - in the price range of a monitor. And then you have a huge market for games when the people are used to it. Now it's just a nerdy gimmick.
The way I see VR right now is a niche version of a gaming console with high barriers to entry and bad image. Gaming consoles took decades to get widespread adoption.
Sadly I also suspect that blockchain will go down with the whole cryptocurrency ship due to guilt-by-association, much like the AI winter that followed the overhyped 1980s era took with it a number of viable limited-domain solutions that had to wander the desert for 20-30 years before being revivified for the current AI/ML efforts.
Well I challenge you to find a single real-life use of blockchain that is not tied to cryptocurrencies then.
Find a single problem that is best solved using blockchain, but doesn't involve crypto.
What the startup did NOT want to be is the single source of authority or federation for permissions, group membership, user management, etc (they would not only become the single point of attack but the devices themselves would be dependent upon the existence of the company continuing to provide federation services, so going-out-of-business would render the devices useless).
The most obvious solution to those issues was a blockchain-based system. As long as devices existed they could continue to interop, the entries in the blockchain provided audit trails, the entries could be replayed for sync purposes, etc.
Basically, limited to niche games and simulation training. Where as AR has more usefulness than VR does. But it doesn't matter since Meta is working in both of those industries.
> Whereas with blockchain, well, it's mostly used for speculation and I still haven't seen people use it as a legitimate currency.
What is wrong with using stablecoins? Everyone knows Bitcoin has failed in being useful for payments or how very volatile it is for a business to use.
Who is exactly printing tons of these stablecoins, USDP? or any other regulated stablecoin?
> and you have the no chargebacks part of crypto.
And using cryptocurrencies eliminates chargeback fraud which that is abused by the users. The merchants can get their accounts shutdown and their money withheld for months due to the payment processors locking the money and they always side with the bank, which of whom have no context if the chargeback is fraudulent or not.
I don't see how one can use stablecoins for speculation purposes, which one can do with Bitcoin, which that is completely unsuitable for payments.
I would recommend VR videos though, there are a few from Oculus TV which are amazing, they are an entirely new experience.
Also VR as some kind of social networking replacement seems unlikely to me because huge par of the time people spend on social networks is not while sitting at home dedicating time to this activity. Most people are not going to lug around VR headset everywhere they go.
Well. That's the key point. Lots of people did social networks. Several had a lot if success with them. Remember circa 2007? FB was one of many. Zuck made a social network that (a) got and stayed popular (b) made no way and (c) successfully changed user behaviour. Before FB, social media was mostly anonymous and targeted at young, fringe or techno-elite online culture. FB are mass market.
I agree that VR is yet to be seen, and that fb's ability to execute is dubious. But, Zuck is more capable than most/all CEOs of social media seen this far.
Twitter us more if a lucky shot.
It remains true though that social media, generally, is not technically demanding. That said, the demands of scale complicate that. Look at Amazon and aws.
There aren't many fb-scale tech companies out there. It's not competition in an infinite field. It's competition in a field of one.. or perhaps three. JPMorgan or Berkshire Hathaway aren't going to beat them at this game. If it's a matter of beating other mega scale tech shops, it may be just a matter of executing better than not executing.
Competition at the ground floor (say series A) is brutal. Even if you're brilliant, you probably need a great strategy and greater luck. Competition at the mid range is meaningful. A Zara, Boots or OnePlus or whatnot still need to beat other players. At the FB/google level... there just aren't enough players. They don't necessarily compete at all, against other players. Products can succeed or fail, but it's not about head to head abilities. Where competition actually exists, like azure/aws, at best it's usually a field of 2 or 6 possible competitors with a chance of outside disruption. They're not in a "beat restaurant in town" game.
I loved Myspace. I met so many cool people in my 20s in that 2-3 year window they had that I never would have otherwise. My mom though was never joining Myspace. Myspace was almost closer to a dating site to find new friends as much as connecting with people you already knew.
Games are not really a good example of why you would want to have that. Not at least yet.
See for example
https://sitevision.trimble.com/
VR as a new way of human existence as the current metaverse hype claims - for that, I've not seen any concrete proofs of yet.
I wouldn't even go that far: it was merely executed well enough that it didn't squander being in the right place at the right time by being terrible.
This is one of the reasons why getting a minimal viable product out quickly (where the definition of “minimal viable” includes that not-being-terrible caveat) can be so important when working on a new idea.
Facebook figured out that using your real full name in an electronic social network had huge advantages in terms of connecting your real world social network.
They killed Myspace because of the network effect the above had when people started finding their friends from high school easily online. Early on I think you even had to join a network specifically for your high school so everyone had their first and last names along with their labeling for their high school.
It sounds stupid and obvious now but before Facebook the average person didn't broadcast their first and last name on the internet.
Right thing¹, right place, right time, executed well enough.
[1] whether this thing was an act of genius or just the right thing if several thrown at the wall, we could possibly debate.
On the ethics thing: they introduced some mechanisms around this, but the appointment of Nick Clegg to drive this as head of "Global Affairs" was always an eyebrow-raiser for those even slightly politically aware in the UK, and predictably less effective than FB management needed him to be (note: I voted Lib Dem in 2010 because I believed in his leadership - it's what he did next that showed the warning signs).
I think another quarter of decline and we might see a major shake-up, and I wouldn't be amazed to see Whatsapp getting payment (including crypto) functionality as a bit of Hail Mary to build another social network moat.
> The payments feature on App is not available in this country.
I was really sad the day that WhatsApp stopped charging money.
It's not clear what, if any, benefit that has had. But it's going to be something
Looking at my teenage kids and their friends, they barely use Instagram (let alone Facebook), it's all about TikTok.
I wonder how important this demographic really is. I understand there's an argument for kids being the future, and so on, but almost everyone I know with disposible income is on Instagram and Facebook, via the apps, and seeing ads. As teenage kids stop being teenage kids, they're going to start caring about sharing baby photos and travel photos and cyber-bullying their mayor and stuff, for which the only games in town are Instagram and FB. In short, I don't think it matters if teenagers are ignoring the platforms as long as they age into them, which I think they might well, especially considering kids don't actually have much money to spend.
You're assuming that TikTok won't evolve in a span of 10 years.
This does presume that the metric is money and not eyeballs; from where I sit tech in general cares little about revenue and a lot about "daily active users".
Despite that, if you can brainwash 0-15 year olds into the belief that your brand is great, the future goodwill may offer significant rewards as you evolve with your users.
I know we're all on HN and know how the sausage is made, but nonetheless that's such a dystopian sentence to have to write! I genuinely believe that the attention (ie manipulation) economy will be today's lead paint and asbestos.
During my elementary school days, we had a small course to teach us about economics and corporate values. The examine two old companies: Nintendo and Reader's Digest. Both companies predated our grandparents and they asked if they would both outlive us as students. The "correct" answer for the assignment was that Reader's Digest would continue on into the 22nd century while Nintendo would be out of business before the 21st. The reasoning was that Nintendo markets to children, who are both broke and fickle, while Reader's Digest markets to mature professionals, who are loyal and wealthy. No one would continue to play video games after the age of twelve and everyone with a college degree who hit thirty would subscribe to Reader's Digest
For those who are unaware, Reader's Digest declared bankruptcy in 2013 and was solve off for £1. Nintendo is currently worth $55 billion.
I always remember that lesson when people talk about how children will age out of enjoying the things that they currently enjoy and age into caring about the things that their parents care about.
The question has always been if META manages to create/buy the next big centralised social network after facebook. And this has always been a long shot.
I think it is...eventually. But the technology to go from where we're at -- where it's mostly just useful for games -- to a true game-changer in the big picture, it's just not there yet. Gonna be several years at the bare minimum, probably, a lot of problems still need to be solved.
Whatever FB's innovation is, it doesn't age well, otherwise fades so fast
I hate Facebook, but I will buy its stock, and I will make money.
Facebook was not the first. There were already mass-market social networking websites when Facebook emerged, like MySpace and Friendster.
The younger generation has already dropped Facebook, like their predecessors dropped MySpace. And they are still able to communicate with each other without using e-mail.
I don't recall much have changed since ... 2012, except perceived quality of search results
Apple has no new products in a long time, just overpriced toys that are sold due to good marketing. Most of their money comes from market positioning and closed eco system.
Thry were innovative in the past (that first iphone reveal), but for last years they basically are an app store that takes a 30% cut.
Does it have MS office with macros, or still only a limited version?
FB have never built a successful product besides Zuck's original. They have never created a good business besides the FB and program. They pushed both to the max.
FB pushed the walled garden hard. They pushed hard on acquiring the competition. They pushed hard on making the product "addictive" and optimising it on a "what FB wants from users" basis.
In its ad business FB pushed hard on leveraging data. Google's AdWords was always based on user intent. Someone searches for "divorce lawyer," and AdWords finds them a divorce lawyer. FB ads are premised on targeting, not intent. So... leverage data to create a segment with >n chance of wanting a divorce lawyer. It worked.
That's FB in a nutshell. They push hard on simple things.
What they need is something else to push on. I agree on making WhatsApp a payments app. IMO, retail finance would suit FB perfectly. They'd be better at it than Apple or Google. Look at retail banks, like Citi. It's all about pushing for revenue. Some newly invented fee that most customers don't know they're paying. Some new way of charging both sides of a transaction. More of something. Generating revenue from customer data, float, 3rd party deals... taking advantage of moat. FB would be really good at that.
Controlling the VR metaverse... I just don't see it. Too much innovation. Too much invention. Too many elements to balance. Too avante garde. It's not Zuck.
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/chromebooks-outsold-macs-world...
(That said, ChromeOS still makes up a much smaller percentage of active installations, as Google don't have the legacy hardware base that Apple and Microsoft do)
You could argue that kindle is a computer too, but it doesn't really matter either way.
I disagree. Apple tried this in the 1980's in the U.S. It was a disaster, no one bought Apple computers for home use and the company almost went under. Apple didn't come back to life until they came out with the iPod. It didn't hurt that they later got a booster when MS released the sh*tshow know as windows 8.
For everybody that I know who owns one, it's their primary machine.
Remember that you can run Docker natively on a Chromebook and you need a VM on both windows and Mac
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-version...
As a subjective observation I've seen quite a lot of ads for those giveaways.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, if I buy, say, a Dell computer with Linux pre-installed then I don't think MS gets a cut? They don't own the PC platform.
Or maybe you mean that most prebuilt PCs come with some OEM Windows license even if you don't intend to use is, which is fair enough I suppose.
Not that it really matters for desktop PCs where Windows is king anyway. Although from personal experience I'd argue that the "essential product" these days is less Windows itself than the Office suite which is still the gold standard in many institutions.
And was never. The Personal-Computer is an original product of International Business Machines (IBM) and not Microsoft. Contrary to most products shipped today it's architecture is open for industry standards and other companies. A huge success for IBM.
Microsoft shipped the pre-installed and required operating-system. You can order desktops and laptops without an operating-sytem or Linux from Lenovo (former IBM), Dell, System76, Purism, Tuxedo and many more. Vendors which aim for cheap distribution to private customers usually only ship Personal Computers with Windows. Most of these are crap and come with questionable pre-installed software - and I don't refer to Windows.
That IBM sold the PC subsidiary was the worst mistake the could ever have done, both Apple and Lenovo show how much money you can earn with long lasting high quality products. IBM lost the contact point to many customers. They need to succeed with Red Hat now. Irony, IBM use and prefer (again) ThinkPads, preinstalled with Linux.
If you say "it runs on PC" you're actually saying your software is compatible to an Intel 286 CPU or higher. Well, if it is portable?
Technically, yes, that is correct, however, looking at the over 90% marketshare Windows has on the IBM/PC space, Windows is pretty much the synonym for the PC OS. Most laptops and PC's sold with an OS by retailers or OEMs, are shipped with Windows by default. It's basically a monopoly.
Sure, on tech boards like this one the proportion of people running some GNU/Linux based OS on their PC is much higher than the statistics, but the average joe consumer is 99% surely gonna have Windows on their PC which is where the assumption that "PC automatically equals Windows by default" comes from.
Yes. The mass market works (thinks) like that. Like you said, we're here on a tech board and therefore I refer to the actual definitions. Depends on situation when correct terms must be used or not.
When people say "PC" as in "PC or Mac?" they do mean computers running Microsoft windows
That was years and years after they had already committed "the worst mistake they could have done", which was not buying Microsoft early on when they had the chance. This should be immediately obvious, as you're here complaining about people confusing Windows with PCs. After that, their failure to secure exclusive rights to Intel's x86 chips, their inability to keep up with all the clones on the market, and the missteps of the PCjr and OS/2, the eventual sell off the PC hardware business was inevitable.
That would likely have led to closing down the clones, not allowing others to use DOS, they would have became an also-ran.
I can't remember if they actually did this or were just trying to but I recall they wanted Intel and AMD to charge a license fee for every processor they sold.
A huge success for users because it created the clone market. IBM was never a big player in the PC market after the clones came out.
> IBM use and prefer (again) ThinkPads, preinstalled with Linux.
Citation required. They had ~300K apple devices several years ago.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-cio-mac-users-perform-bett...
Remember FB can always purchase themselves into the market - pick up a few startups and bodge together a consistent product.
I think the problem is that VR tech and apps will take too long to arrive to gain any traction with the wider public, before FB needs it. FB needs hundreds of millions/billions of users, VR hasn't punched out of the 'early adopter'/gamer market yet and even those were balking at having to have FB accounts.
The Index isn’t perfect, but the actual story of Oculus is just them making a cruddy MVP, Valve taking the time to show their far superior prototypes, and allowing them to copy them, and then Oculus and part of the Valve team selling out to Facebook (ie Michael Abrash). Virtually all the innovation in VR was made by Valve, the only innovation Facebook has added is inside out tracking.
So Oculus is really just another Instagram /WhatsApp - they purchased a solid team and product, but they’re not out innovating even smaller players in the field.
It's hard for me to hear your argument when you don't address the most obvious criticism.
Plus the cable tethers and the need to bolt and wire up the IR lighthouses to your livingroom walls vs the Quest that you can slide into your backpack and take with you and play virtually anywhere indoors.
The simplicity, polish and ease of use of the Quest and its ecosystem really killed the tethered VR future regardless of much more high-end the hardware was, just how the iPhone simplicity and UX polish killed the Nokia and Blackberry power-houses.
You are criticizing them for a industry standard practice. Make loss on the console, make it up with the software. With what they are doing with the Steam Deck it seems like they have learned a lesson about trying to make a profit on the hardware from their VR efforts.
But Valve has Alyx. Oculus tried to have a Mario in Lucky’s Tale, and Lucky is a super cute and appealing character, but gaming is older now. I had to look up the name of Lucky’s Tale to remember. Alyx has WAY more mindshare imho.
I wasn’t looking so much at cost as much as capability to innovate.
The manufacturing cost for the Oculus has to be far less than the Index since Valve reportedly isn't making much off their headsets. For argument if we say Meta's costs are $400/headset and Valve $900/headset, that still makes the Index over twice as expensive and it still can't run anything without being tethered to an expensive PC!
I don't know how you could seriously try to argue that kind of price undercutting isn't "innovating".
I'm hopeing that Apple, Valve and hopefully totally new players can enter the VR/AR market and make better products than FB without selling out to them. My only realistic hope for a competitor to Quest 2 is Apple at the moment.
They'll make great hardware but the price will keep it in the "well off consumer" range. Good for Apple because that's where the profits are but it won't make VR mainstream.
Apple's VR doesn't have to compete with the Quest on price if their product is that much better. Which, hey - it's Apple. They might be able to pull that off.
In every other region not so much. Here in Western Europe they are far from market leading, though still able to be considered 'mainstream'. But due to the inflation and lack of salary increases here since the 2007 crisis, most people go for midrangers now, and the iPhone SE is not attractive at all (old design, no oled screen). Just looking around on the subway I would see nothing but cheap Chinese phones now, most of the iPhones are from tourists.
I'm bullish on Oculus since I think they'll get the software and exclusives right (also I have one and I'm impressed by it) but I don't think Apple being an upmarket brand is going to slow them down at all.
Tthe first iPhone cost $499, and they even dropped the price of the $599 iPhone after a few months to $399, in a pretty unprecedented move by Apple. The price was clearly too high for a market that had not yet proven its value. VR is in the same situation as the modern smartphone was back then.
For VR, I wouldn't be suprised if a lot of people would be ready to pay a premium just to have device that has feature-parity with the Quest 2 but is not owned by Facebook. You have to understand that so many people use the Quest 2, despite the fact that they hate Facebook (yours truly included).
I doubt people are willing to pay that much more just to avoid facebook (especially considering facebook is decoupling their logins again from the quest services).
With current inflation rates (The EU is printing money by the billions per day) I do see a big gap in American (especially Silicon Valley) purchasing power and here in Western Europe. Whereas a few years ago I'd see only flagship phones in public transport, now it's a ton of redmi, budget samsungs etc. People don't have a lot of money anymore.
Yes, for sure. And I think that's a part of the reason they haven't released a VR headset yet. Give it a few years (maybe 5?) and there will be enough entertainment value and other utlity from a headset, especially if the ergonomics get better, which they will.
There's a huge difference between selling a phone which is a status symbol and a VR set that has to have actual utility (entertainment, etc).
People pay more for iPhones even in Africa because it's a status symbol - only the rich can afford them.
Carmack has also left Oculus, hasn’t he?
Microsoft was first to this in the consumer space with WMR
That hasn't been true for a long while. Having a room-scale VR system back in 2016 certainly made Valve look quite a bit ahead of Oculus's "Rift is a sitting experience, have an Xbox controller" disaster.
But these days Oculus is far ahead, they are constantly adding new features (AR, hand tracking, wireless, standalone, 2D app integration, etc), while SteamVR is still mostly the same as it was back in 2016. At the moment SteamVR is barely even usable and full of bugs (resolution and input settings regularly disappear).
That's not to say that Oculus is the only one innovating, Microsoft's WMR Portal was a great attempt at bringing the Desktop into VR and they were the first ones with 6DOF tracking in a standalone headset. Some of the AR pass-through stuff, that Quest2 has just added, could be done on Daydream years ago.
But Daydream is dead, WMR seems to be on life support and SteamVR isn't getting any improvements either, all while Facebook went full throttle and is pumping out new VR features every few months. The only one that might have a chance at competing with Facebook's VR effort at this point is Sony with PSVR2 and maybe Apple, but their VR doesn't seem to not be aiming at the mass market.
But: . I don’t see a lot of apps using many of these features at all.
. I don’t think VR will ever win the consumer space. I’ve been working on it for half a decade now, and I don’t know anyone who regularly uses their headset for entertainment. Party trick? Sure. Everyday use to watch a Vr film or play a VR game? Not really. I own a headset myself and I barely use it.
VR is a productivity and industrial tool, that’s where the true user adoption is. FB is fundamentally misdirected, and the sooner people get that the sooner they’ll realise there’s nothing there at the end of the rainbow for Zuck.
They've got enough people working on this I don't see how they can't work on gaming and work at the same time.
Valve's stuff isnt really superior for most users for what you get for your price point. There price point for entry is TEN TIMES what Occulus is, and I've used both headsets. Yes Valve is better. It's NOT 10x better. Maybe not even 2x better. And if you want to play Half Life Alyx, the cheapest way to do that is to buy an Occulus and hook it up to your computer. Valve has effectively put themselves in the luxury sports car lane when it comes to VR.
Occulus and Sony's VR for Playstation seems to be the actual entry points for most people when it comes to VR. And Valve isnt even really positioning themselves as a competitor to Occulus sense Steam VR has Occulus support. They seem to be fine wiht letting Occulus be the entry point sku and Steam VR being what people do when they go further down the ecosystem of what is currently the VR niche hobby.
You seem to know what you're talking about but it's really hard to take it seriously when you misspell the company's name.
VR games are generally casual / active. Not playable in most apartments due to space needed. Most gamers are into either shooters, dark souls style games, or moba-style games. And action/rpg - which is great in VR, but there are also only a couple of them.
Metaverse? Live in VR? Why? You can live in real life. People have other things to worry about.
Maybe in places like Tokyo or Hong-Kong as even in my small European apartment, I could find the 2x2m space needed for VR.
I've had some basic exercise and lots of fun with "Until You Fall" on the Index.
Racing sims especially. Many popular racing sims have great VR support, and a lot of them have very detailed textures (compared to the average VR game). Combine that with a good wheel and a structurally solid rig, and you really feel like you're driving an actual race car.
The downside is that it does take up significant space and requires extra hardware (wheel, pedals, rig, etc.), which is a dealbreaker for many (me included at the moment).
With a physical wheel then just simulating vision makes it true virtual reality for car driving.
Almost nothing else is like this though. Virtual reality swimming I think is the best example of why VR sucks in the general sense. The visual aspect is just a small aspect of the experience of swimming. We can't simulate any other aspect of it with VR goggles.
Simulating most real life experience is much closer to the problem of swimming than the problem of driving a car.
these are incongruent.
> Who would engage in any kind of personal interaction with that?
tons of people do regularly. see https://playtracker.net/insight/game/2704 do note: not all vrchat users use VR everytime. but still the numbers arent insignificant. not to mention disabled people who cant participate in society as well as the average person, may want to experience a world where they can walk, go to the theater with their friends or swing around like spiderman.
as for fun games in vr? try pavlovVR, into the radius, until you fall, beat saber, legendary tales...
People are also glued to phones. Children are making TikTok videos. My point is that people do interact online. The issue with VR is fidelity. It just doesn’t live up to what people imagined yet. Compare what we have to TV series like “Upload” from Amazon.
Anyone who wants to play chess or poker online most likely already has without VR. Sitting across a virtual table with a virtual person with an annoying headset on to play chess or poker online is practically a downgrade from what we have now. It is a one off parlor trick.
Decent VR experiences require space. Room scale requires, well, pretty much a whole room to play it in. A room free from obstacles. An entire empty room just to play a game. I have one such room, and several times I've found that games still insist on placing objects outside the designated walkable area. Most people do not have an entire room to dedicate to VR.
And most VR experiences really aren't worth it. They're largely novelties rather than something you want to interact with every day. The only exception I've experienced so far is Beat Saber, but even that with it's minimal around-the-room movement frequently has to throw up the guardian because I swung my fist too close to a wall.
This has been a brake to economies of scale applied across the industry, so the existing players can put their logistic efforts in to keeping up their supply of existing products at the same price as they launched, which is enough to start competitive. Without the shortage, I expect we would have seen many more and cheaper Oculus Quests being sold.
For a point of reference, see purchasing the Valve Index, which last I saw if you buy from valve has a lead time of at least a month, despite launching in 2019.
If I want to play a game on my PC I just double click the icon and I can start playing.
If I want to play a game on my VR headset I need to move furniture to make space, then I need to unbox the headset, I need to put it on and take 3 min to adjust it because my girlfriend is the last one that used it, then I need to define the space available in the room, and then finally I can enjoy a 720p game, interrupted by the red walls of the guardian when I get too close to the limit of the space I defined. Then I'll need to move back the furniture and everything...
The reason I barely play VR is because it's a chore to setup and I'll have to spend at least 15 min before being in an actual game.
Provided that it happens at all. People tend to extrapolate too far based on something being subjectively attractive for a limited group. Think of 3D TV hype a decade ago (and we're thinking of technology that actually debuted almost 100 years ago).
It's been like what, 3 years? that I've been patiently waiting for the UE (or someone, in general) to mandate Facebook to remove mandatory account signup and tie-in, before buying an Oculus Quest (now 2). I don't care if this means I end up not buying and enjoying it at all in the end.
Sadly I guess just a minority have such firm positions when it comes to "vote with your wallet", so in the end the vote ends up being nothing more than a self-imposed punishment. But thankfully VR is just a very superfluous experience for now to be missing it, so I am fine with that.
I'm sure many of the supporters of other independent VR hardware project (such as Simula VR[1]) are of the same opinion.
This will both scare off potential acquisitions and slow things down a lot, enabling others time to make better plays.
Even if they choose all the right targets it will still be hard.
If anything is going to come of this it's going to be AR, without a doubt. People want to be able to see the world they are in, they don't want to walk into tables, have to disrobe to answer the door, tend to children and so on.
AR adds value everywhere in the real world. AR can blend meetings, add meta information to day-to-day tasks. Think driving, you can now have your maps, speed, collision warnings, and so on in a virtual heads up display.
Even if Meta knocks it out of the park with early AR it's going to be a long time coming and they will still have a trust issue that younger, faster AR startups won't have.
But I disagree that VR is anti-social, it is not exactly the same as being irl social, but the success of VRChat (a social VR platform) and Zenith (the first good VR MMO) has shown how big the social aspect is.
Social VR easily showed its use during the pandemic and the lockdowns.
However, social VR is also immensely useful for more introverted people, which more extroverted people might not realize. It is quite simply easier talking to people in VR than it is in real life. It is good therapy if you want to view it like that.
I think you're confusing introversion with social anxiety.
AR is the space I'm least excited for. The more we push AR the sooner we will have ads in our face everywhere we go.
Yup. AR = Awful Reality.
It's pretty resilient.
FB? Like others have said, the social media FB itself is pretty weak, and like you also said - addiction, and walled garden are the locks in. It can only grow financially by (more) acquisitions.
Also, FB bought Oculus. It has grown since, but most of where they are is on trajectory from the purchase. Meanwhile, VR as a whole is neither a big not profitable market. The competition are also a bunch of upstart-ey businesses/divisions limited by investor generosity.
Zuck makes good acquisitions, no doubt about that, but Oculus isn't an Xbox yet.
Xbox, OTOH, is proof that Microsoft could enter a completely different market, compete, win and create a whole new business division. It was already a mature market.
I'm shocked it's that high, but, honestly, for an early effort, that's pretty competitive. If I'm reading Microsoft's 2005 annual report right, Home & Entertainment revenue was $3bn in 2005.
I still don't think VR is going to supplant console gaming, but console gaming is a big business--Xbox-level revenue would be a 15% increase in total revenue for Meta.
I also don't think Zuck's stated aspirations are a +15% boost in revenue by becoming a successful competitor in the gaming market, which is why it's so easy to criticize the insanely overstated goals of the "metaverse."
I can certainly see the criticisms mounting, if FB go financial. But, I also recall the many times FB withstood criticism. Criticism from users over product changes. Experts on privacy. Journalists and politicians on social issues and user manipulation. They persevere, and rarely have to give an inch.
OTOH, I think FB is the world leader in gaining leverage from customer data. Their ad business is more based on targeting data than Google's. It could conceivably even survive the demise of FB itself. Finding partners to run ads is doable, and with fb's targeting that still could ad up to major and business.
So perhaps they're not great at securing customer data, though they are probably more as technically capable than most banks. But, they are the very best at leveraging and monetising customer data.
Call it a high risk, high reward investment.
FB has the most targeting-centric ad business by far. In dollar terms, I can't think of anyone earning as much from customer data as FB.
I'm curious: do you have any awareness of the fact that there are very unethical actions suggested in what you are discussing here casually?
The way I see it, this is the biggest thing they need to turn around. To a point where they might need to launch a product - or maybe a paid tier - that is somewhat separate from what the FB experience has become.
What users want from FB needs to be explored on multiple levels. Ability to sort posts chronologically between a subset of your network, 'suggested' connections you can filter by relevance to a subset of your interests, customizable local community participation alerts... there are all kinds of ways of exploring vast social networks that can actually benefit society.
I strongly feel that prioritizing content which gets people riled so you can feed them more ads is such a massive negative, showing a willingness to change something so terrible yet fundamental to their current revenue would be the most significant thing they could do. It probably won't happen, but despite my increasing pessimism I still like to imagine better possibilities.
Can we argue the same point for Google?
Considering their dominant position in digital ads, I wonder what this implies.
I don't see how you could do that. Even recognizing a blind spot like that is extremely difficult and then changing that company DNA is near impossible, it might be even harder than pushing for more innovation.
Both are the same problem though: changing culture. That is only possible with a drastic change at the top, which didn't happen.
Zuck would have had to have a personal epiphany for that to happen because he's un-fireable.
Right? Imagine what could've been if they would acknowledge problems they've caused and co-operate with society to help overcome them. Such a radical idea. Instead, in the hands of capitalism, they were focused on the short-term giant profits that everyone knows won't last forever. It'll be joyful to watch it collapse. I think they were to proud of themselves to admit what they've created - a 21st century phonebook and that's it.
It's a good play only if he finds a way to monetise it on a similar scale he does with the social network. I might have my open-mindedness failing me, but I simply can't see a way how VR can be monetised even close to selling the access to and influence over masses on a global scale.
I hope they hadn't even tried. Initially, Facebook offered lots of value in the early years in the form that users were actually able to follow their friends' lives and stay connected. You had a bunch of friends and you would see a mostly chronological list of what they had posted that you read until you recognized something you had already seen. If they had kept it that simple Facebook might actually be something I'd be willing to pay for. The newsfeed is absolutely the core of the product and they started ruining it about ten years ago, and very steadily at that.
They could've easily expanded into more social features, longer-form stuff like Livejournal, personal creative stuff like Deviantart, and personal creative/selling like Etsy and Bandcamp and print-on-demand books, etc.
Another killer feature they flopped on was personas. Nobody really wants their entire extended family, current former and potential coworkers and bosses, customers, preacher, old friends, romantic interests, drug dealer, and fetish group all hanging out together in the same room talking. So people made separate accounts and different names but Facebook continually fought hard against that very basic nature of human social networking.
Instead of any social-networking improvements to their core, they just removed all the value from the feed. And then bought out another messenger and another place to post photos, both of which they already had. Then a halfhearted videos thing and now a VR Second Life clone.
Facebook needed to fill that gap with content from elsewhere. That's where influencers and content creators came in. Who are way less interesting than your friends, but they do post content regularly.
I don't think facebook had a choice.
It's like only one in ten SMS texts would actually reach the other party: people would complain about SMS being broken just like they complain Facebook doesn't show them what they want to see.
Instead of your friend's posts you will see half a dozen random posts from your friends each day, too often from one prolific poster, and the rest is ads or group spam. Why bother writing anything relevant, deep, or fun when only a fraction of your friends will ever see it.
I think that Facebook's only real revenue option that would have also retained the fundamental value of the social network and its effects was to behave either as a third-party sentiment/preference analysis service ala Nielsen Ratings or as a source of ad targeting for individuals (based on their sentiments/preferences expressed within FB) that could be sold for use external to the FB experience... and I have suspicions that even the latter might have eventually led to distorting that core FB experience.
The social network and the behaviors within it were only truly valuable if externally observed without intervention. By pushing behaviors that FB itself wanted users to perform they broke the uniquely valuable part.
There used to be way to view posts off a friend list, and you could then create a list of all of your friends to emulate the old newsfeed (or The Wall). This at least tried to work except it also only tracked back so far, it still did miss posts (but not as many as the other two views), and most importantly the friend list feed was scrapped last year.
Yep, I am surprised they didn't do this many years ago. WeChat does this pretty significantly in China.
I suspect that’s because it wouldn’t just let anybody in. Looking back, the decision to open Facebook up to everyone was (in my book) a bad one. I’ll use the nightclub analogy — a good social network, like a good nightclub, must have bouncers (of sorts) to ensure a quality experience. I realise the conflict between this and Metcalfe’s “law”.
Also, seriously, why not just charge for Facebook and WhatsApp. WhatsApp usage is at levels now when a lot of people will pay for it — and at one point (pre-Facebook) they weren’t free in first-world markets.
No, the lesson from MS (and IBM, Oracle and SAP) is that once you have a large enough moat of captive users who can't really move away, you can just "go on" and deliver crap to your users as long as the quality of the competition stays below the quality of your crap. And if there is someone coming close, buy them up.
The problem of FB is that there is, at the core, nothing except the "network effect" that creates such a moat. No multi-year contracts with governments or megacorps worth billions of dollars, no source of recurring revenue other than ads, there is nothing that fundamentally ties customers - both "end users" and advertisers - to Facebook.
It used to be for young uni students and posting photos of your night out, nowadays it's for retirees arguing about politics.
Not every company needs to be Apple to succeed.
What I mean by that is - random disappearing newsfeed elements, and random exposé of page admins' personal accounts while commenting on something, bizarre disappearance of comments, loading signs everywhere and for everything and what not.
Sure, one can argue their investment into ReactJS could be considered as innovation. But, look at the business side of things - What value has ReactJS ACTUALLY provided to the site NOW compared to what it was in 2010? Not much. In 2010, Facebook was this minimalist website where you could add people and post stuff on each others' walls and yeah, occasionally message them. Today, it is a beast that is tons of megabytes downloaded to your computer on the first page visit with a "Messenger platform" - which is just rebranded basic messaging functionality and the clusterfuck that is "Facebook business suite" which is an unnecessarily complicated garbage UI for basic page admin functionality and their "Ads Platform" whose feature set various with where and how you use it. Not to forget Facebook's screwing up of m.facebook.com (the mobile site) where it is barely usable now and with half the features not working (eg. links in stories). Oh, and did I mention about Facebook Lite, Facebook App, Pages App, etc etc. and none of them look like a complete, polished product.
Facebook is a classic case of a taking a good product and screwing it up with needless complexity to the point where the core product is unusable. All this Meta push is just a nail in the coffin for users like me who have had enough - whose expectation wasn't much - just to stay in touch with friends and family. Sometimes, innovation could be as simple as maintaining a stable, core value proposition. I am noticing a lot of people around me are switching back (anecdotal observation) to plain old websites and blogs to express their thoughts and I love that.
I for one, can't wait for the downfall of Facebook, so we can go back to less bloated non-react-vue-js powered SPAs and just back to bare hyperlink powered static webpages :)
“I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS. People just submitted it. I don't know why.!They ‘trust me’. Dumb fucks.” - Mark Zuckerberg at 19 years old.
No, he always had scummy intentions and does not deserve credit for exploiting people’s trust.
Meta has interesting products for VR work: virtual desktop, meetings/calls with presentation slides. They are one step from decent AR: their passthrough mode is quite good.
They have enough cash to buy any decent VR product and a team behind it, if they see a potential synergy.
So I think Zuck's bet on VR may in the end play out. A hype around everything "metaverse" is unprecedented right now.
Disclaimer: I have a long stake in $META in my portfolio.
I'm just surprised it's taken this long for it to start affecting hard numbers.
Facebook has created Facebook Workplace from scratch which is very successfull, is this not innovating ?
Facebook has resisted the growth of Snapchat, is this not innovating ?
WhatsApp has continued to grow after its acquisition and is very successful today.
Facebook is clearly one of the most innovative company of this size.
Buying companies and being able to make them grow is clear proof that Facebook is innovative. In the real world most acquisitions end up failing
Now regarding VR. I'm really happy he is going all in on it. He might fail but it's a bold move. Too early to tell but I'm not betting against him.
I had hope that Libra (now Diem) would bring them into personal finance. There are hard problems to solve and the industry is ripe for disruption. Every FB user could have a FB wallet. Remittance, Marketplace, loans, etc.. So many things possible across the entire globe. Not just in the West. They could eat PayPal's lunch.
Instead, Zuck turned his focus to the Metaverse. I really don't get it.
They actually have that already. Now it's called "workplace"[1] but before it was called "facebook for work", think Yammer from MS.
I don't know what the uptake on this product is, but this specific product might be a case of "Solving a problem no business is having." For instance I think it'd be hard to justify purchasing this service for an enterprise without a compelling use-case. But I certainly think that Facebook has the resources make something that solves a problem that people really do have.
On the other hand, Slack seems to solve a problem pretty well that most businesses have.
Finally, I don't think VR as it currently exists solves a problem any business (or person) truly has beyond sheer entertainment. It remains "cool tech" that has yet to find a solid, non-gaming use case for the average person. This may change but this is why I currently think Meta is in trouble and I'm puzzled as to why Zuckerberg would go all-in on VR.
If Facebook could have embraced the mainstream interest in privacy and converted themselves to become a global digital identity provider, they could have become so much more and be on ethical side of history. Now they are almost pursuing both, while not realizing that they have to let go of one (and incur short-term losses) to pursue other.
I used to work for an extremely unfashionable website that nevertheless was one of the most visited on the web (even though you'd probably be surprised by that if you knew the site) and my experience there was that leadership tried to replicate that success with dozens of other products and never once was able to do it. So much of what made the original site successful was timing and luck.
Convincing my parents to buy a computer so I could program was a struggle. We were on public assistance.
I am not saying that it's all like winning a lottery - you still have to take advantage of the opportunity, but they were born in Earth's orbit when trying to launch to the Moon, while most of us had to overcome gravity first.
Luck is not everything, but it IS a factor.
You are kind of right about innovation force at facebook. Although, really not sure, why they didn't do more of it. Like getting into cloud similar to google. Especially pytorch kind of feels better then tensorflow. Really strange.
On the other hand google innovated like hell, but in the end it's still google search which makes most of the profits. So maybe there is just not much potential in innovating and holding it's position is more important (which they are doing).
10 years ago Facebook was the place to know what’s going on in your social circle. You’d find out about events or share experiences, setting relationship status was something of significance.
Then the feed became more and more laden with sponsored posts or posts by meme pages. Sharing something personal in this kind of environment suddenly felt awkward.
These days it’s rare to see posts by actual people you know - so why bother?
If I was in Zuck's shoes, I would kill all political content on the site... immediately and banish it to never come back. Really all outside content needs to go, I don't want news of any sort from FB aside from the "original content" my friends produce. And if you want, inject a reasonable number of ads in between, and I can deal with that, but their "product" in my eyes is their social feed, and that is a fraction of the size it once was.
It’s strange that they didn’t spot this happening. They do now, at least!
It's just that most users they lost went from "I use Facebook" to "I don't want to use Facebook, but kinds still have to" (because friends, family etc.).
All people below 40y I know which have Facebook fall more or less in the second category...
Definitely in the top 10 best thing to ever happen to me.
wow.
There are other ways to deal with specific users, but flagging accounts doesn't seem outlandish to me.
> But not all growth trends were negative. The company’s family of apps, which encompass Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger continued to modestly add users. The number of users logging in monthly to Facebook continued to grow, even as the number of daily users dropped.
What's interesting is that it seems like Facebook isn't counting Messager users as Facebook users and that more users are actually using Facebook every month, just not as frequently as before.
The weird bit is that a drop that small and cause Facebook/Meta to lose that much value. The stock market either reads the news like HN does, or Facebook is a lot more fragile that I would have guessed.
After inflating the video play numbers I don't put anything past FB.
https://hypebeast.com/2019/3/facebook-user-base-decline
WaPo links to US declines as early as 2018:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/30/faceboo...
The big news here is a worldwide decline, which shows a rather larger weakness.
Facebook may count me as a user, but my account has absolutely no information listed about myself and the only pages I subscribe to are for the school.
I see lots of kid/parent related stuff done via Facebook with family members with kids + I and am curious how necessary it is (i.e. would I be able to just not use it + still get necessary info).
Its android app has a rating of 1.9, but jeez, at least it's not Facebook.
Instagram is for moderately old people.
Snapchat is for moderately young people.
TikTok is for young people.
I’m trying to do my part in keeping my teens off social media. I’m about 50% successful.
I almost never see any of my friends posting on Instagram anymore. The only ones that do are artists and people with some “personal brand” to promote (aka, they have a business interest in posting to IG). Some more people post on stories, but even that’s rare.
Like Facebook, most people I know hate using Instagram, so I figure it’s only a matter of time before it’s engagement numbers go down.
I’m in my 20s for reference.
I feel like in the coming years we’ll see these Gen Z kids almost entirely eschew posting on social media. Most young people I know are almost entirely socializing with their friends via messaging apps, while very rarely making posts on social media. Instagram will fade from relevance for the youth, much like Facebook, and I don’t expect that any social media platform will replace it. Yes, TikTok is popular, but it’s more akin to YouTube that twitter/Facebook/Instagram.
We’ll probably see some dramatic headlines about “the death of the social network” at some point over the next few years. Messaging will be the future of digital socializing.
I think this is ultimately driven by young people coming to the realization that posting to social media is either completely unfulfilling, or actively detrimental to their mental well being. Platform owners thought they could ignore the issue, without considering that their target demographic may very well just reject social networking all together.
Instagram : millenials
TikTok : gen z
snapchat is sort of irrelevant from what I can gather.
Occasionally people will send me a link to something and it's on Instagram. Clicking for me give me a Login modal. They make it too easy for me, click.
It's completely unlike other social media and it's addictive without being negative, which kind of goes against our current instinctive thinking about social media.
At the start, it's completely dumb videos that kids will find funny.
But the algorithm is smart and will find content you like.
My feed is now ultra cute cat and cat rescue stories, and really, really sharp non-professional comedians acting out vignettes, they are better than anything pro, and better than anything on TV, and, amateur musicians playing solos, odd instruments etc..
I enjoy TikTok more than Television or Netflix.
It's very hard to describe to non-users because on paper it's very much like YouTube, but the format is so short, and the kinds of bits are so much more ephermal ... and for some reason most of the toxicity is not there.
Also, you get to see first hand some 'live events' because people stream from everywhere, and it gives you neat perspective. For example, the 'Trucker Convey' in Ottawa Ontario. After watching the event live from various perspectives on TikTok, while simultaneously watching broadcast news cover the event, it became unsettlingly clear how aggressively misinformative broadcast news was of the event. (Even if I fully disagree with the protesters, they should be represented fairly)
TikToks has radically changed my view of content moderation and demonstrated that it additivity does not have to be based on fear and anger.
They censor aggressively, and get away with it partly because it's not really seen as a platform for 'information'. So you won't see a lot of controversial things there, and also I don't mind that technically 'Tiannamen Square' content will be absent. I mean, it's just TikTok (is what I tell myself).
It's disturbingly addictive without being particularly political or controversial and for that reason alone it's worth having a look at for those who care to pay attention.
In what way? It seems like something between vine an instagram.
It's a bit distressing the number of negative commenters indicating that they don't even want to try something that's the #1 digital in the world. It's like saying 'I don't want to see what TV is because I already don't like the radio'.
TikTok is nothing like Instagram at all, which is mostly oriented towards imagery.
It definitely is a bit like Vine, but the longer segments allow for a lot more creativity, moreover, I think the number of people with smartphones and 'decent cameras and willing to make content' is just considerably bigger than it was previously.
I watch cat rescue videos, and then the 'day after follow up' appears in my feed the next day, I find it intriguing.
It's certainly not for everyone, but it's definitely something that anyone working in tech should try out, so they get a grasp of what is happening in the world.
-- First - we are curious, we try things 'just because'. Of course, nobody has to be.
-- Second - if you want to work in an industry, you're going to have to have at least some baseline understanding of what's going on. 'Experiencing' something gives you quite a lot of insight into the nature of the system that cannot be described otherwise. It doesn't mean you have to like it.
For example, the content moderation algorithms in TikTok are unlike any other app. So different in fact, that it's revelatory.
The 'consensus view' among most people in the industry is that FB and other social media drive attention via toxicity. The TikTok algorithm turns that view on it's head. For most people, it's completely the opposite of toxic, it's quite fun and it's frankly more 'addictive' than FB.
Some deride the notion of 'additivity' as 'toxic' but I'd argue that's not necessarily the case, for most people it just means 'it's good and they like it'.
-- Third - " in the absolute best case scenario, a brainless waste of time?" - this bit is really dim, seriously, I can't believe I'm reading it.
The whole point of my claim that 'you should try it to see what it is' would be to take a moment to grasp actually the reality at hand, instead of coming to arbitrary conclusions that make you seem completely out of touch, like the 'Boomer who can't use Zoom' (as a negative stereotype).
Some examples of unique content on TikTok that doesn't exist the same way on other sites:
1) Vignette soliloques - actors playing short-hand hilariously comedic characters, snarky bits of satire and comedy. There are few accounts I follow that I consider funnier than anything on TV.
2) 'Cat Rescue Series'. There are memes of mostly middle aged married white women tracking down federal cats and rescuing them from sometimes harrowing situations. You can see the transformation of feral cats, through their episodes at the vet, sometimes through rehabilitation. Sometimes the animals are permanently injured and learn to live blind, or without a limb. You can follow along with their recovery process in almost a 'real time' basis, with videos coming out sometimes more than once day. They're 'just cats' but it's incredibly invigorating, because it's real. It's more engaging than any 'reality TV'.
Cats being rescued from trees. There's a few channels for that, the videos are almost live.
Other animal related memes include animals being born on farms, for example a liter of goats, with the 'runt' being saved by the farmers wife, and their growth.
The semi-domestication of a pet Coyote etc.
3) 'Intelligent Pet Meme's - there's a dog called 'Bunny' who has learned to 'talk' with a series of 50 or so buttons, and the creator provides content updates almost daily. You can literally see an animal learning to communicate with words, learning 'tenses' (like tomorrow, yesterday, this morning, this afternoon) etc. and it's incredible.
4) 'Live Streams' from events all over the world, for example, the current 'Truckers Sit In' in Ottawa, which I do not support, however, seeing inside the protest, the kinds of people, how they are acting ... it's enlightening.
And all sorts of other bits of content the algorithm brings up.
Some of it is ridiculous, arguably much of it is a 'waste of time' but not more so than television or Netflix, but in the end, it's a unique and new experience, essentially it's unlike anything else.
Personally, I can see this being a bit of a fad over time, but the sheer number of people using it, the nature of the creators, the explosion in 'variety' of content will permanently make its mark.
Refusing to 'try' TikTok is akin to refusing to 'trying' Netflix or streaming. It's ridiculous.
What motivated you to post this?
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/18/tiktok-usage-topped-instagra...
It doesn't really seem useful for sharing the same kind of information that people use Facebook for (mostly text based information, questions, etc).
They can always expand, but I feel like these social media services usually have a hard time pivoting to a different medium after their initial success.
FB has a captive audience, that is aging with facebook and will continue using it.
It is clear why FB purchases IG / WA. They are paying money to capture audiences with money earned from FB.
Going ahead, the cycle will repeat. Once the teens in IG grow into adults, FB will use money from that to buy / make another platform.
In this context, the metaverse makes sense. It is a virtual world, where new SM platforms are churned, with all future populations being part of one or more platforms. FB wants to be the owner of all the platforms.
From a business point of view, it makes more sense, in that, FB can now target ads across platforms, meaning, they target the same number of individuals, but with ads being channeled through different platforms, the ad density comes down, and the feeling of "the feed is all ads" might reduce.
I dont know the answer but as a non-FB user I do see limitations when people organise events or group chats on messenger. If my wife wasn't connected to most of my friends I'd probably miss out on a bunch of relevant things. So for youth not on FB, I guess time will bring them back into the fold.
1. Even if FB isn't forced to divest their recent acquisitions, the regulatory environment will make it much more difficult to do the equivalent of buying Instagram in the future.
2. Any good ideas on how I can short "The Metaverse"? I still think the Metaverse is bullshit and will continue to be bullshit for the near future. The very first time I got on Facebook I was pretty enthralled - I was connecting with friends that I hadn't seen in years, and I really liked reconnecting. I have heard basically nobody say they are looking forward to the Metaverse, besides aging tech giants trying to push it.
I'm a huge fan of VR gaming. The state of the art is incredible right now, but it'll get so much better the more money is shoveled in.
* much higher barrier to entry (requires specialized hardware)
* much more difficult to produce content (3D worlds to build from the ground up vs text and images of the real world)
* less cool than most video games (YMMV, there might be good VR games, but toons with amputated legs flying around are not cool, and that's what we saw in the Facebook demo)
* several safety and social acceptance issues (basically, you don't see the real world when you're using a VR headset)
* VR is not fun to spectate (checkout twitch, there is not much VR content)
* VR has been around for many years already, and it stays... a niche game accessory.
That is, VR gamers just want to play games, including collaborative games. They don't want to sign in to Facebook to do it, they don't want to "live" in the metaverse, they don't want some shyster hocking their NFTs in VR while they're just trying to play a game.
This whole Metaverse BS just completely feels like Second Life 2.0 (Third Life??)
I've watched this marketing turnover at least three times now in the music industry, and I really think the killer antibody is exposure to history. The operative question for a 14 year old hearing a super "original" band isn't what does this say to you... because they know what it says to them but they don't know how easily they're being manipulated by the distillation of time-worn, shop-worn, lazy songwriting. The question is: Hey, do you realize who they're ripping off? You'll be a lot cooler if you know.
That's the pill every human needs when they encounter a new and addictive social media platform.
That already happened btw, teens are on TikTok not IG
There are alternatives, such as sites like HN (single feed for everyone), Reddit (per-subreddit ranking which is global rather than algorithmically targeted), many news sites (organized by department vs infinite scroll, newsletters (here's today's set of stories for everyone), etc.
Man I'd love this for actual stories. Turn the Facebook advertising AI on finding exactly the right passage of the right book at the right moment.
I'd have a hart time comparing HN, deviantart and a few other places with facebook and instagram..
A hybrid of Vine and Instagram designed to make you stare into your screen with the smallest of interactions.
In my circles the only time I have to use Facebook is when Gen Xers are organizing something that requires my participation there, and I delete the account afterwards.
Or I wind up in small town America and the people there believe that Facebook marketplace + groups has better resources for sale and meetups. My experience with that was that generally accessible forums (even with being private and an “approval” process) all being full of scammers and time wasters. I found resources and niches in person. I checked the same groups 6 months later and nobody was getting anywhere with anything. YMMV of course, but the scammers are integrated everywhere.
Small town America is a big place so there is a market for the illusion of utility!
This is a battle you and your kids can't win unless your kids know how to identify when a nasty company is trying to steal their data. If your daughter thinks something else is cool, I bet that's another nasty company trying to steal her data instead of Facebook. Our society can't get out of this trap until your daughter says, "they all SUCK"
NO: Teach your 12-year old that ALL these things are COMPLETE FUCKING BULLSHIT. Not just Facebook. All of them.
My personal favorite is Chevignon selling cool clothes for teenagers for years, to then enter the cigarettes market because why not.
Some might argue Facebook/Meta is on another scale, but everything is on another scale, I think we'd need to adjust expectations like we adjust for inflation.
Video games were popular and well selling, but to my recollection they had an uphill battle in the wide public’s perception. If we were to ask, I’d wager Sony had a way stronger “coolness” factor in the 80s 90s.
Now, tables have sure turned.
Watching TV or talking about shows wasn't cool. Movies were. Having a pager or godforbid a giant cell phone was extremely uncool as it meant your parents could find you. The closest thing to a smart phone was a TI-82 calculator and that wasn't cool at all. I had a Palm Pilot... I even got a cell cradle for it and could browse the web in black and white in 1996. That was considered insanely not cool, and something only a total nerd would do. (But a Lynx or a Game Gear was alright - and a neogeo meant your parents were super rich). Clove bidi cigarettes were cool but they could make your lungs bleed. Weed and LSD were cool. Fake IDs were cool and making them made you popular. Playing in a band even if you didn't have a lot of shows was cool, and if you did have a show half the kids from your school would be there.
I can't really think of anything I did as a teenager that collected data about me or anything that was a "service" run by a company that was cool or would have been considered cool. AOL was extremely uncool, the way facebook is now. A bit later, I guess a lot of us used Friendster and Myspace (and boards like LnC) but none of those things were central to daily activity or something you spent a lot of time on. It wasn't even the third or fourth thing you'd do to waste time, let alone a place to spend time with friends. So just because it wasn't very central to the teenage experience, and the technology wasn't there to track your interactions and location, there was by definition a lot less data to collect.
I'm describing a world that is for all practical purposes dead, buried and forgotten, in which human interaction was mostly unmediated by corporate grifters.
They did use IG ~2y ago, but then it went out of vogue. Same fate for SnapChat. It is very likely there will be something new next year end they will all move on from TikTok.
Fascinating to observe how they have zero product loyalty. And I realized FB can have a problem, unless they want to spend billions on acquisitions every single year. It’s good for everyone that their monopoly is crumbling a bit.
So...what is the appeal of teenagers again? Is it being "cool"? What can I buy for cool?
For a long time, DELL grew and grew and got bigger. Then they plateaued (for a while) and the investors were mad.
There are only so many people in the world who want an FB account. and only so many companies and people who need a DELL computer.
Infinite high growth is impossible to sustain. Physically.
Investors (people) expect a remuneration for their money. So, a public company can only survive with growth.
Growth and risk/reward balance is what keep companies alive.
I would think, that a company that has plateaued should take itself off the stock market, however this doesn't seem to be happening. Such a move would probably imply some drastic changes in how a company is goverend.
Pretty much the only way to do it is with an outside investor and in that case the company still doesn't "own itself".
Right now it feels like Wall street is realizing the growth party at Meta is ending. Now it's about figuring out how much, if at all, it's going to contract and what the real value of the business will be going forward.
there are private investors, angels, VCs, etc.
I really just want to see what my friends are up to. I don't want to feel that the posts I get are heavily filtered by algorithms or that 'unpopular' opinions are hidden or whatever.
The original Facebook product back in 2008-2010 was really good. If anything, I think Facebook shows how important is it to develop a product vision that is more than just 'clickbait+++' which is basically Facebook's strategy. [Around 2010, I imagine a bunch of overly nerdy socially maladjusted 20-something programmers sitting around Fakebook HQ describing to robotic-Mark how an excel-driven click-bait approach can make Fakebook way more popular than ever. "Look popularity with maths".]
Now the only thing I really use it for is business pages. [I don't even know why Google don't have a slightly better business-page experience on their maps.]
Zuckerberg, I think is a bit of a genius, but seems to lack much capacity or instinct to display technological 'taste'. That rare thing Steve Jobs valued and talked about. It's why Apple is and remains cool and why it's able to handle PR better. Apple are just much more sophisticated at controlling people's perception around the appeal of the brand. Apple provide a 'luxury' brand experience to 50% of the (developed) world. Facebook's brand is so toxic it decided to change it's name to Meta. [Note, timing the change to Meta not long before the growth slows a lot. I'm surprised Facebook was really even growing much. Well I heard most growth has come from outside the developed economies and it's a waste ground among the young in the West.]
Zuckerberg - from afar - looks like a robotic alien trying to work out the grandest legal pump and dump scheme he can pull off. I do salute him because he's so successful and I still think he'll work out how to make Meta's transition. He's got lots of cards to play in his hand and he seems pretty good at business poker. So, I also congratulate him.
I'm now wondering if such a blip could snowball via the markets and see a tech crash at some level and a sign of that will be how this news from Facebook plays out upon the other social media outlets. Will TikTok, Twitter and in-part via YT, google, also see a dent in share prices based upon this! Maybe, given how much of the market is based upon perception and momentum. Though that is just my thoughts upon this and certainly I'm not burried into the markets knowing every nuance and sign.
[EDIT ADD] I somehow missed this poignant aspect in the article "Shares in other social media platforms, including Twitter, Snap and Pinterest, also fell sharply in extended trading." So does somewhat lean into my thoughts upon how markets operate in some ways. How that holds and if this blip is just a knee-jerk reaction over a period of time is more the indicator in-play here.
The time the average person spends on their phone (and social media) has only been increasing year over year. If Facebook's growth is slowing, that's directly at the hands of competitors.
Oh and yes, TikTok seems to of hit a sweet spot(also the best stock bet currently), but if they can pull off 18 years of solid growth in interaction, that will be amazing.
Paradoxically, the stock market itself for many is their social media outlet, which probably seen a longer streak of growth than any social media platform.
Be interesting how HN growth and interaction has tractioned over the years, but then it doesn't matter as this is the Sparta of social media interaction in many ways and I ruddy love it.
It’s easier to blame competition than to admit that users are growingly apathetic towards your product (sans competition).
Facebook’s falling engagement, in and of itself, is great news for other social media apps.
TikTok’s rising engagement is, in and of itself, bad news for other social media apps.
I don’t think these two pieces of information net out poorly for other social media apps when overall social media usage is rising.
We’ll see in short order. Earnings calls are coming up in the next 7 days.
If that's not the case, then the 25% of market loss doesn't make sense to me -- are FB ads bulk purchases somehow, or are they by user?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3020117/when-it-comes-to-faceboo...
Wealthier people, I imagine, are not only more likely to want to buy things, they'll also be more willing to spend their money on new things.
To get a sense on how much more valuable "valuable" consumers can be for Facebook: last quarter on average they made $60.57 dollars per user in the USA/Canada, vs just $4.89 for their users in Asia-Pacific, for example [1]. The USA and Canada are still Facebook's biggest money-making region, in spite of also being the one where they have the fewest active users [1].
I'm not sure if an immediate 25% share price dip makes sense either, given worldwide Facebook lost only 1 million DAUs, and the number of users in the USA/Canada has steadily oscillated between 195/196 million since 2020 (the loss was in "Rest of the World" the catch-all region they make the least money in.
A lot of the value of these companies is not necessarily realized value, but value derived from the expectation of continued growth at a certain pace.I can see why investors are nervous; Facebook has never lost DAUs, there's intense competition with TikTok for the young demographic, VR/AR has been a huge bet that still hasn't paid off and the controversy around Facebook weakens the value of the brand. On top of this, in spite of revenue being good, it was not what was expected and effectively advertising on the valuable iOS demographic got much harder. Maybe that warrants a 25% dip, maybe it doesn't— in any case there's definitely reasons to be nervous.
[1]: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4...
"[...] there are two things that I want to call out that are having an impact on our business. The first is competition. People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly."
Oversharing is a really bad idea in the long run. Your opinions from 30 years ago are probably hated today. Imagine the trauma that is caused if you could read what your parents thought before you were born.
Facebook (the social network) was known to be in decline for years. The real attention is on Instagram and WhatsApp are still adding users. I wouldn't rush to rule them out yet over this.
I feel like TikTok is more closed and that I don’t have a shadow profile on it like Facebook did.
But it’s also because the web (especially the browsers and mobile OS) learnt its lessons.
OTOH, it also means that newcomers will have to make even more efforts to to "compete" with the historical open web which can create even more situations of information disappearing from the open web.
>maximize engagement
It encourages engagement with upvotes and additional privileges when an account gets more points. However, the site’s design doesn’t maximize it. I don’t get push notifications to check the site, awards, or suggestions for other relevant articles in the comments.
>promote outrage
Outrage can be a factor that causes posts to rise, but deliberate policies avoid optimizing for it. Specifically, the avoidance of editing the submission title, unless the purpose is to make it less clickbait.
>instill a fear of missing out.
This is most subjective, but I get the sentiment that if someone posts an amazing project, there’s a good chance of constructive critique in the comments, or more information from the developer about how they made it.
Other social media websites don’t have the depth of discussion (just photos of the best parts of their life, without talking about the challenges). This is relatively more of a cultural/user base observation versus an interface decision, however.
For conspiracy theories, antivax, and misinformation, the alternative is heavier moderation. It looks like a judgement call by HN moderators to err on being less interventionist with user discussion. There are tradeoffs, but I think the benefits of free discussion outweigh exposure to misinformation, so long as one reads skeptically and critically.
HN _mostly_ prevents this by having strong and good moderation, but there's still a fair amount of negative metrics coming from it.
I used to be able to go to business websites and get the information I needed, now everyone primarily uses Facebook pages to post information, which means I have to log in on many occasions to view the content. The Internet before Facebook was much more convenient for me.
Facebook hasn’t resulted in any positive interactions for me. Something about the platform drives people to be confrontational. Years ago when I participated on the platform I would reply to friend’s posts. Sometimes I would get replies from their friends and they tried to argue with me. It boiled down to them believing I said something in my post that I did not write. That drove me to not write my thoughts about something, and when I did reply, it was with shallow positive comments. That is a very boring way to interact with people, so I stopped using the platform.
"at lewd teenagers dancing to the latest tune or whatever the kids are doing these days." ... is a seriously dim view.
TikTok is literally the #1 app in the world, and for someone curious enough to read HackerNews but unwilling to even try app to understand the nature of its impact is a bit odd.
Personally, I despise Twitter, but I read it occasionally, and understand why it works, and what kind of content is on there. I would find it problematic to work in tech with someone who doesn't understand 'why people like Netflix' having never even bothered to stream a video before.
In particular, the feed algorithm is unlike anything else in tech and the content is definitely a lot less toxic.
You should definitely try it, that doesn't mean you have to like it.
Don't mean to be rude but you appear to have a quite limited concept of what 'working in tech' can entail.
It's fine to not want to use those services (I personally avoid most of them), but to ignore them, or worse, purposely avoid even understanding what they are is straight, self imposed ignorance. It's ridiculous.
Further, who cares what you find problematic? People don't work for you.
What is there to know about the Arab world?
What is there to know about Hacker News?
What is there to know about AI?
What is there to know about anything? Until you experience it yourself.
Self imposed ignorance is a guaranteed path to obsolescence and irrelevance.
It would be ridiculous if a colleague never 'tried' streaming, email, or 'Video Conf'. because they were too narrow to even care to understand.
It doesn't mean we have to care about HN, the Arab world, video conferencing or streaming, but it does imply a hefty dose of ignorance to not even bother to try to understand.
The range of content on TikTok is unlike anything else, and there are definitely a few forms of niche content forms that have never existed before, and a bit hard to explain. So see it for yourself or remain in the dark.
"who cares what you find problematic? People don't work for you."
Well people do actually, but that's besides the point.
If you want to be 'the old man who can't use email' among your peers, of course it's your choice.
Tiktok is a bunch of videos. A lot of them, according to you. You open the app and play a video. Then it suggests the next one.
How does this conceptually bring anything new, other than it working well? I mean, I know what an app is. I have Youtube, which also has lots of videos. It's an app to watch videos. Shocking?
I think the main reason for it is that most of us are just old enough to remember what facebook was before they started filling the site with ads and recommended/paid/suggested/etc posts. It was really fucking great back when you would logging and there would be literally no content/ads other than what your friend manually took the time write/post.
they gave us a taste of what a great minimalist social media platform could be and then turned monetisation/engagement to 9000.
Imagine if HN was bought by reddit and they decided to use the reddit platform (new skin only, no "old.XX...") with all the ads and everything. That's kinda what happened to facebook.
- they have/had a critical size. No other social media was that big, and size matters.
- they required (still do?) real IDs. Forcing people to use their real name is a special kind of awful, especially when it's the main network
- they push a unified account platform for everything they owned. Other companies tried too but most failed (I also hate Apple for that, if you were to ask).
I know several pacific islands were going to ban Facebook but apparently it's heavily in use by businesses.
Regina Lepping, a young entrepreneur from capital city Honiara, said the announcement had sent many small business owners scrambling to find alternatives to Facebook.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-15/solomon-islands-backt...
Most importantly, it's easy for them to update and maintain a Facebook page, versus an independent website.
I'm not comparing physical newspapers to Facebook. The Internet has obviously won. What I've said is that governments of all levels should not be allowed to solely distribute important public information solely via private platforms. A newspaper was just an obvious example, one that already has a legal precedent.
[0] https://www.nypl.org/research/collections/articles-databases...
In the modern world, they basically lose digital citizenship for their mistake. There's no route for reconciliation or re-entry into society when it comes to major tech platforms and bans. With prison, you theoretically pay your time and then can re-enter society. Not so with online bans.
Seems like a simple solution.
No, the simple solution is to enforce public authorities not to use Facebook (or similar platform) as their main communication channel.
You know the saying "it’s easy to make a Twitter clone, it’s not easy to become Twitter". Well government don’t need to become Twitter, so what is stopping them to provide a "public" Twitter clone just for those communications ?
Similarly, every state that I'm aware of has both a Public Access Radio station and carries NPR broadcasting.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government-access_television
<< We found this slower route instead >>
If we could just get discord to <insert short feature wishlist> then I reckon the golden IRC days would be back with a vengence.
But the whole UX around using them is very very different.
And that is what matters for the normal user.
Just the list of lacking default features is quite long, like: predictable display of formatting, emoji, pictures, file sharing, voice chat, nested conversations/threads, chat history, different user roles, user avatars, etc.
And yes you can bolt all of this on top of IRC, but that doesn't matter. Defaults matter. At least for the common users UX.
And as long as the IRC standard doesn't include most of this points by default (especially chat history, avatars, etc.) it won't have another golden time.
Also no msg-commands as the default way to do things, programmers might like them, the common user doesn't.
Likewise, everyone was familiar with the 'Prodigy' and 'CompuServe' icons on our desktops with earlier versions of Windows, but nobody used them.
In the Phillipines, Facebook is tied in with your mobile provider so most people only got Facebook (when I was there some years ago). Facebook is what some people there called the internet. Definitely a walled in garden, and definitely a strategy by Facebook to create a moat in some countries.
>links medium blog post which can only be accessed behind a login
Admittedly I use Google for the answers. But I’ve never once needed FB. Is this a regional thing? Some areas exclusively use FB for a storefront?
Some random website containing a restaurant's information simply isn't worth maintaining if all your customers use Facebook anyway.
Not a good plan for any business, I would think. Would be nice to see more businesses on Mastodon or (gasp!) just run their own websites again. Can you imagine how difficult it must be for a business to buy a domain, hosting, and slap together a static site in this day and age?
If they focused on being a social network tool, instead of eating competition so they are _the_ (only) social network, people might increasingly use their products.
But they give nothing back.
I beg you to please get some perspective.
That's 0.15%? As countries are opening up more. And that's newsworthy?
I don't see how that justifies the stock crashing -25% in 15 minutes.
Look at the numbers alphabet and apple posted the last few days. Huge growth.
Facebook is not only growing but much worse, shrinking.
I’ve been bullish on FB from the ipo date but this seems like the beginning of the end unless the meta verse is out of this world
When (not if) Facebook stops growing, it will be worth _something_. Owning its stock is a bet on what that number is, and the stock price reflects the market's collective estimate.
It could mean they're really certain it'll be worth more later, or it (more likely) could mean they ran out of ideas and are trying to shore up the stock price, too.
- On average, they net around 35 billion a year. With a valuation (MC) of 887 billion.
- On average, Google net around 51 billion a year. With a valuation of 1.8 trillion.
Facebook is making 68% as much as Google, with its valuation at less than half the price. And over the past 4-5 years Facebook's revenue has grown on average 32%/year, while Google grows 23%/year.
Really undervalued company IMO.
And their revenue did grow. They grew year-over-year. Just missed their target by 3%.
I got a message that said "We aren't cool enough to support your browser".
Something about the sarcastic snootiness of the message really angered me and prevented me from ever opening a Facebook account. Later I blocked all Facebook domains in Host files and it's been that way ever since.
For awhile it was a bit awkward with people demanding to know why I didn't have a Facebook page but apparently I hold grudges for a long time. It's been delightful to see people come around to my point of view on Facebook.
They really are like a seedy bar in the bad part of town. With snooty messages for circumventors. But I have to thank them for that snooty message otherwise I would have probably caved and opened an account years ago.
Really? I think Facebook's message is kind of nice compared to the standard "Please use a different browser". Whereas the common message implies that you are the problem for using an unusual browser, Facebook's message acknowledges that they are the problem for being less cool than you.
Your reason and theirs have little overlap though it could be argued that condescension is a symptom of internal malaise which is also reflected in shady business practices which is causing users to now abandon FB.
Don't try to be cute in your messaging, just straightforward and direct is my takeaway. Some people might appreciate the cute but others you might anger if you don't get the tone just right.
The high P/E big tech companies enjoy is on basis of the implicit expectation to keep growing fast[1], if that on confidence on growth is no longer there, then price will reflect closer to a more traditional tech stock.
Tesla trades at P/E of 185x, Amazon - 58x, Microsoft - 35x, Google - 29x and FB - 23x[2]. I think it accurately reflects the market expectation of their respective future growth.
---
[1] Same reason Tesla is valued so high despite relatively modest revenue, the expectation is massive growth on the back of their lead in the space and the accelerating shift towards EV.
[2] SAP, IBM, ORCL all trade in the same range today.
Worse, Logged in once, then told Facebook to keep themselves logged in forever. This technically means users who have logged in.
Peak cigarette consumption (per capita/US): 1963
Peak oil production (global): unknown, maybe 2020-2030
Peak Facebook: ??
That's an incomplete peer group, but I find it interesting that at some point, society does start to unplug from addictive substances. The tapering off is quite slow, though. Unclear whether heavy users cut back, or new generations just don't develop the habit as older ones die off
Peak coffee is in 1946, but what have consumers moved onto from then? Alcohol, Tea, Energy drinks, Soft Drinks ?
https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/58920/finding_buzbyf...
- Gatorade and similar stuff - A movement to drink water (HydroHomies) - High caffeine energy drinks (Red bull and the likes) - Healthy alternatives (juices, smoothies, etc)
Coffee 1946: 46.4 gallons per person
Coffee 2005: 24.2 gallons per person
Soft drinks 1947: 10.8 gallons per person
Soft drinks 2005: 51.5 gallons per person
Total caffeinated consumption in 46/47: 57.2 gallons / person
Total caffeinated consumption in 2005: 75.7 gallons / person
The chart seems to indicate tea has stayed relatively flat in the same time period. I'm not sure the history of caffeine pills or ADHD medicine, but those may also contribute to an increased consumption in 2005.
[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2007/june/coffee-consum...
Wow, no wonder Diabetes has skyrocketed.
51.5 gallons is almost 900 ml a day. That is about 100 grams of sugar per day.
This is like a epidemic of sugar addiction.
I don't say this to condemn these drinks (if people like them that much, they're free to spend money on the little things in life they enjoy), but I'd like to square my experience of not caring for them versus their clear popularity from statistics.
Your logic is sensible adult talk ..
ps: my body crashed I'm now borderline allergic to processed foods and sodas, it's still strange to me :)
My parents forbade me from soda growing up, but my cousin once snuck me some sugary orange pop once (I didn't like the fizz when I first tried it, but I liked it more when I tried it again). I still have a preference for it sometimes due to the memories (along with root beer, which I also tried when younger) if it's free, though just a small cup. I never tried Coca-Cola or Pepsi until an abnormally older age, so that's probably why these two never stuck for me.
This is the crux of the matter. Whether something is too sugary is a matter of taste and habit. It tastes too sugary to you, but great to other people.
But this is the thing about addiction, to the person who isn't hooked it seems odd.
As a kid I used to wake up at night and drink Coke. I just craved it, that's how it was. I still like something sweet to drink but I control it these days, and my taste is not quite the same as an adult. Still, there's no accounting for it, you want something because you want it. Best explanation I can find is that it triggers something connected to reward paths in a way that isn't how that reward path evolved.
I find the coffee at 46 gallons stranger. 570ml a day of coffee? What's even more wtf is that in Central Europe during and after the war coffee was very expensive/difficult to get so people were drinking coffee substitutes (chicory root for example) while people in the US drank half liter a day.
>Coffee 2005: 24.2 gallons per person
24.2 gallons per person.. so that is 24.2 gallon / 365 days * 128 oz/gallon / 8oz/cup = 1.06 cup / day.
1 cup per day? That seems crazy low. I guess that must include kids/young adults..
Perhaps the US used to drink espressos in the 1940s, I'm not sure. That's if this fact is even accurate.
US consumption in 1946 was apparently ~20 pounds of coffee beans annually per capita, or an average of around 2.5–3 (8 oz?) cups of coffee per day for the ~3/4 of adults who were regular coffee drinkers.
Per https://www.retrowow.co.uk/food_and_drink/coffee/coffee.html
> Most people [in the UK] made coffee in a jug. You boiled the water and added it to ground coffee already in the jug. You let the ground coffee settle and it was ready to pour through a strainer and drink. Some people then boiled the coffee again.
My impression is that coffee preparation was comparable in the USA. Neither paper filters nor instant coffee were common until decades later.
Espresso was unknown in America back then. Rumor has it that GIs, when exposed to it, diluted it with hot water, giving us the modern Americano. [0]
Facebook's numbers are falling despite a growth in world population, and I'd bet a larger growth in the internet-connected population. That's worse, especially for a platform heavily reliant on network effects.
This one interested me. We're at a local maximum in terms of coffee consumption in recent years. After WWII coffee fell off in popularity and due to the substitute of carbonated soft drinks. Most likely in simplest terms it was a cheaper energy drink for the poor.
Hardly the best example of America getting over an addiction.
And uh, does the genocide of the Uigher population somehow not count as an evil? I mean I know they are Muslims and not Jews but seems like we should be concerned about them being forced into camps and sterilized...
This is not to say TikTok is some wonderful, innocent thing. But the harm done by it compared to Facebook is just not remotely comparable, at least not yet, and that may be partially due to the nature of what the platform pushes and to whom.
I do wonder if ByteDance does really just want to chase profit here though, and letting TikTok be weaponized by the party would hurt that.
I'd say it is actually remarkable just how long Facebook (the site) has been able to maintain relevance, whereas people should have been bored and migrated to something newer and shiner a long time ago (as is now finally happening with apps like TikTok).
Facebook is the least of my problems when it comes to addictive substances. Youtube, Reddit, Hackernews, TikTok. They're all the same even if they don't go out of their way to insight addiction.
Coffee consumption begin 15th century
Tobacco 18th century
Oil: 347 AD
Social Networks: circa. 2002.
And the indians of America consumed it much earlier.
Just to clarify.
Interestingly this article was featured here recently: https://luttig.substack.com/p/dont-forget-microsoft
It doesn't talk about software, development, technology or service. Merely, buy others. If you don't innovate yourself you have to buy quickly everyone else before they can harm you. That is what Facebook is doing.
It wasn't VR then and it won't be now. VR has gained a foothold in this wave in its niches of gaming, other "entertainment", and random educational and military applications. General casual use beyond that is a pipe dream.
Strapping on a VR helmet is the opposite of everything most people want to do with their faces, their bodies, their lives. Contact lens form factor AR, if it ever arrives, could change the equation wrt human nature.
I'm happy to be proven wrong but this is my perspective as well. I just cannot imagine us delving so far into VR that is transcends beyond physical space. I mean at what point does that idea become dystopian enough that people decide to go outside and take a breath of fresh air, feel the grass, see and hear the planet?
Imagine meeting someone online, dating or friendship, you put on a lightweight VR headset and get transported to a replicated NYC rooftop bar, where loads of people from around the world are sitting, drinking and chatting. Socializing with a date or a group of people at the comfort of your home, going on outings, inviting your friends to your digital house, work meetings in a digital office instead of Zoom (I already seen companies doing this; VR meetings). People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world. Zoom, Skype, Discord will seem like old world relics.
It's like the appeal of World of Warcraft when it was a its peak, but not gaming - not appealing to just gamers. Appealing to everyone who's open to socializing online.
It is absolutely unreal.
> People will be able to form romantic relationships and stronger friendships from across the world.
Romantic relationships without physical proximity sounds totally dystopian to me.
But even if you're not very into socializing online. You'll be able to sit and work at an EMPTY desk, with no monitor and no mouse, put on your lightweight headset, and suddenly have 3 large monitors appear in front of you which you can manipulate with your hands (think Minority Report, Tom Cruise), while working in a more aesthetically pleasing environment.
You'll be able to sit in your empty living room, put on your VR headset, and suddenly have a 100 inch TV in front of you to watch movies -- without having to buy this TV in real life.
Buying a monitor may seem as ridiculous as buying a fax machine.
If this fantasy technology were actually invented (and made comfortable to wear and affordable) then I'd buy it, sure, but I'll believe that when I see it.
You'd have to think Apple could do the trick with their history of building integrated hardware/software experiences and a similar war chest, but it's also far enough away from the core products of most of the giants that some outsider might get there first.
Ultimately (as has always been true) the internet's greatest power has always been its reach. With free ubiquitous reliable video conferencing, you now have the ability to get to know someone anywhere in the world.
From a dating PoV you're basically getting a 2-3 order magnitude bump in potential partners. For many, I can see people giving up on the physical (in the short term) to find an emotional match a worthwhile tradeoff!
YMMV - my own life now sprawls the whole globe, things like WhatsApp made maintaining global family ties so so so much easier in ways people really take for granted now. My parents used to arrange by post a preset time for a 5 minute phonecall when they wanted to call their parents internationally. All trends point to remote connectivity getting more and more high fidelity.
God, if I'm forced to strap on a VR headset just to be social with someone at least put me on one of Saturn's moons, not an NYC rooftop bar.
For me the killer application is the ability to replace the office. There's already VR software that lets you have a virtual workspace with multiple monitors in VR. It would be so much more convenient to be able to have a large virtual office available to you in VR rather than building a large, physical office IRL.
It’s all marketing hype and it’s creating dreams in peoples heads that will come crashing down when they actually use whatever this product is. Because whatever they ship, whenever they ship it, will be a thing that is huge and has little knowledge of what it’s market fit will be.
They aren’t starting small and nimble like a startup. They are betting huge high stakes games with almost no real market testing.
They'd be smarter to keep their head down and just keep buying whatever network get's cool down the line IMO.
For small, local groups, Facebook is a great free way to setup events (like group rides) and share hobbies.
My motorcycle group used to use Meetup but it has a fee and has much lower engagement.
I've stopped using it as a way to communicate with family and friends because of the toxicity related to political divisions. I had to leave a family group messenger chat when two of my brothers started calling my oldest brother vulgar names while talking about my Aunt and Uncle dying of COVID.
It’ll keep the investors distracted for a few years, which will buy Facebook some time to actually put together a real product (who knows if it’ll be something anyone wants to use)
We are now at yet another generation switch and newer one is somewhere else.
I remember this conversation 6-8 years ago about FB. Is older people liking your platform really a death-knell? If so, I am curious what the timeline for TikTok would be.
People say that about YouTube as well. They'll complain about conspiration theories and fake news, when there are literally videos on practically any subject (physics, History, cooking, sports). It's is YouTube!
It's like people will ignore every delicious food on the planet, go directly to the sewers to feast on feces, and then accuse everyone else.
At some point, someone who likes to feed on shit ought to question their culinary choices and take responsibility.
Facebook is a shadow of what it use to be after running off everyone.
Yes, everyone ran off, leaving only 1.9B subscribers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2688665.stm
I still remember it and the changes that came after it, the McDonalds of today is nothing like the McDonalds of 2003.
We'll see what Facebook does, I assume buy out Snapchat or Tiktok or some other product where the kids hang out.
Building remodels aside, what are you referring to? They have chicken wraps and salads? Otherwise it seems more or less the same McDonalds of my childhood?
These markets likely to first have user attrition
Good. Keep going. Facebook, doing harm at scale.
I predict that what we call "social media" today - this specific aspect of ubiquitous human connection - will continue long after FB is gone and forgotten. I foresee that the ultimate successor will likely be more of a protocol like RSS or FOAF that various platforms can plug into, rather than another web app you log into, owned by yet another monetizing corporation.
The last years, my Facebook feed has been completely dominated by a few groups I'm in (OK, I guess - but not what I signed up for originally), news and commercial entities I have "liked" at some point, and ads.
I never see my friends there any more, unless they're the marketing hustle type. It feels honestly not entirely unlike LinkedIn, which is not a compliment.
As a test, I visited some of my better friends profiles to see if they have posted anything lately. None had. For YEARS. All their content has moved either to Instagram or Snapchat, or they have just stopped posting altogether.
But my group of friends still use Facebook as our primary Event invitation system, and roughly everyone has FB Messenger (as that's the standard here in Norway).
0/10 for them and anybody who made their money there
Tiktok has come out of nowhere in the span of last few years to compete. FB doesn't have a market capture as the US lawmakers and Lina Khan accuse them of having.
Also, the same issues like disinformation etc which FB suffered from is going to be a problem for any social media platform, even Tiktok. Tiktok has far less infra and resources invested into stopping it, so it will be interesting to see if the target shifts on to Tiktok now.
In poker they call this a bluff
Just to clarify, I'm fine with seeing some ads in between chronological posts. But the feed is entirely ads after 5-6 posts. Hoping some brave instagram PM reads this comment.
Also, ads that I see on IG are always promoting small businesses and never scammy. Actually it is a source of discovery for me.
All friends that I have love IG, been using it since 2013 daily. Visual culture is far more interesting than crap on FB or ephemeral social toxicity on TikTok/Snapchat. My IG contacts/feed never discuesses politics or activism.
Having an almost 100% concentration on a business model that is (thankfully) increasingly seen as a socially detrimental aberration, it means that they would need to diversify into more conventional tech business models the way, e.g., Alphabet/Google is trying to do [0]
The problem is, of-course, that honest tech business models are a well occupied ecological niche and in the absence of some regulatory/political granted monopoly the competition tends to turn lethal.
They could launch a cloud business for example, with the unique selling point: we know best how to collect and monetize your data, so we know best how to protect it :-).
[0] I am dismissing the "metaverse" thingy as some sort of smoke and mirrors that seems to be necessary to provide cover for precisely the kind of news now being discussed
If you but the whole amount, I'll write into my will that my decendant's also have to honor your claim. If any of them becomes king or queen of mars, could be quite lucrative!
No one I personally know cares about Metaverse, including young people and Facebook users.
The comment that tells me facebook is on to something.
Metaverse is like a video game, except every time you play you are forced to have an awkward family and high school reunion (both at the same time).
Look at Microsoft. My bet is on big enterprise/cloud tech + video game companies.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/well-didnt-work-segway-technol...
But all 4 left pretty quickly. They all described the experience as good for their bank account but bad for their mental health. That's saying a lot coming from game devs.
And if they're basing it on VR they don't have to scale very fast either.
I think you need to define "metaverse".
What is it, besides an ugly, much less functional Second Life? Who's launching it? What is it good for? Why would someone use it over...well, you have to define what it's good for before I can even ask that question.
- Work meetings
- Socializing
- Dating
- Creative endeavors
- Improved workspace
You'll be able to have work meetings at a virtual office. You can do that now, but the experience will be better. You'll be able to socialize with friends across the world, meet up at virtual replicated areas (like a rooftop bar in NYC..) and meet other people while you're there. You'll be able to go on virtual dates with a long-distance partner. You'll be able to put on your lightweight VR headset and be stationed at a better workstation, with larger monitors where you can manipulate the interface with movements of your hands without the cost of buying such a work set-up in real life. You'll be able to sit on your couch, put on your VR headset and watch movies on a 100 inch TV screen without having to furnish your home with a TV.
The possibilities are endless. Where's your imagination?
When I watch movies at home often I'm only halfway paying attention to the TV while simultaneously eating or talking to my family or working on my laptop. There's no way I'm going to wear a VR headset most of the time. The TV is hung on the wall so it takes literally zero space.
I'm guessing what will happen is that this will open enough doors and develop some early talent to go on to something worthwhile
I'm curious, how do you expect promotion to actually happen if you feel like "this" (this being a change in branding by a large company) is astroturfing? What is a non-astroturfing way to promote a new idea/product/thing? Or do you think any form of promotion is astroturfing?
What's the status quo with VR problems?
- Price: This was fixed with Quest 2
- Complexity: This was also fixed with Quest.
- Socially acceptable: Nope. Even when you remove the issue of the toxicity surrounding Facebook's brand, most people refuse to either try or use VR regularly. Case in point, Meta is giving away Quest 2's to their employees and contractors. imo it's surprising to me that not all of them took the offer. One common answer I get is, "This is going to be as gimicky as the Wii right?". imo the form factor is what drives normal people away. It has to be smaller and closer to goggles before mass acceptance happens. Apple is most likely right on their approach, based on their patent submissions. Conversely, Apple's weakness will be price.
That highly depends on your setup. The more physical space you have, the better if you want to move.
> VR is gimmicky, like the Wii.
Have you even used modern VR yet before panning it? Google Cardboard is ancient and doesn't count as modern VR. I ask because this answer tends to come from people who haven't tried it.
If that's true, why? I'm especially curious about your complaint regarding "very limited freedom of movement" when you claim to have a large physical space for VR. VR has lot of problems, but that is a very strange complaint. Which games or apps did you experience this in?
Stationary games like beat saber don't count.
This is not an illusion of freedom of movement, but it's actually real freedom of movement vs sitting on a chair and getting an avatar to do it via a controller.
> Real movement happens on point and click teleportation or some of the other fake locomotion schemes.
I think this is your problem. Stop using teleport and actually move. You can get feet trackers to bring more immersion, but nothing kills immersion more than teleportation.
> Stationary games like beat saber don't count.
Why wouldn’t it count? I’m pretty sure it does just like ping pong and boxing.
> I don't think I've ever moved with any sort of... conviction. It's always just a couple steps in any direction, almost always fairly slowly.
I think it's highly dependent on your setup and game. imo playing Quest 2 wireless helps a lot. If you have a lot of physical space for VR, but you fail to actually use it; it defeats its purpose. It's akin to complaining about the lack of tactile feedback in a video game, when you have both vibration and sound turned off.
I still find this a really strange complaint.
Nope, that's not a real choice. I have 10m^2 of free space, which is far more than the average person has, but its still not enough. I also can't move very quickly. Running in VR is not advisable, but walking in video games sucks. Go to a VR warehouse and watch people play with a warehouse scale game with no physical limitations. They still just kind of walk around slowly.
> Why wouldn’t it count? I’m pretty sure it does just like ping pong and boxing.
I already got the standing still experience with the wii. I mean its fine, those games are among the best vr has to offer. Wii boxing and table tennis was also solid. But I'm not going to trick myself into believing that its substantially different than what we had before. Were it not for the head motion tracking, these games could be played on a TV. I can play beatsaber expert+ levels without wearing the headset so long as there aren't walls to dodge. The headset isn't adding much. It's just that motion detection remains a fun gimmick.
> I think it's highly dependent on your setup and game. imo playing Quest 2 wireless helps a lot. If you have a lot of physical space for VR, but you fail to actually use it; it defeats its purpose. It's akin to complaining about the lack of tactile feedback in a video game, when you have both vibration and sound turned off.
It's more like someone trying to convince you that video games are completely different with vibration, when in fact, they're more of a nice touch.
That sounds like a personal issue, and not a VR problem.
> Running in VR is not advisable, but walking in video games sucks.
There's obviously not enough space to run, but that's not to say that you can't move quickly within your designated physical space. It's not like you can't run in place, or buy a movement rig either.
> Go to a VR warehouse and watch people play with a warehouse scale game with no physical limitations. They still just kind of walk around slowly.
1. Those games usually have 1st time players or players not familiar with the levels. Of course, they're going to move with caution.
2. Run & gun doesn't work in reality. In real life, you can't effectively shoot while running or moving fast.
3. Contrary to your personal experience, people do run in those games when they have familiarity with everything.
> I already got the standing still experience with the wii. But I'm not going to trick myself into believing that its substantially different than what we had before.
I can't help to think that this is just disingenuous. 6DOF VR is no where near comparable to Wii games. With Wii, it doesn't track your position so you can play everything sitting on a couch; the amount of movement needed isn't as drastic. It also doesn't fully envelop you visually. This is just a really bad argument. Beat Saber and other VR "single room" games like ping pong still count for movement.
> It's more like someone trying to convince you that video games are completely different with vibration, when in fact, they're more of a nice touch.
That's a bad analogy to VR because vibration is no where near as immersive, which is why I mentioned sound in mine.
This is going no where. We'll just agree that we're probably never going to reach consensus. imo the issue is that for unknown reasons, that are likely personal, you have problems with moving your body which is the real underlying reason for your issues with VR.
I find its a tiring gimmick that is just being reused in every game. The novelty is less for every subsequent title. People like fast movement and action. Nobody walks in games. People won't like game design that encourages slow walking for long. Your human meatbag is not particular dexterous and it shows in the VR games coddle you with their enemy design. And the experience of shooting and taking cover is very hard to differentiate in VR across titles.
I think classic controller games will end up being a popular format for VR when the motion control gimmicks wear off.
You don't have to do "slow walking". By default the controller included in almost every VR platform allows you to move faster if you want within an VR FPS game. Anything available in a pancake game is also available for VR so I still don't understand this complaint. If you want more immersion, then you can get a movement rig like KatVR or run in place with Vive Sensors using NaLo.
> Your human meatbag is not particular dexterous and it shows in the VR games coddle you with their enemy design.
I would disagree. It works just fine, because it's actually easier to aim with a blaster in your hand vs indirectly with a mouse. If you have issues with hand eye coordination, that is not an issue with VR itself.
> And the experience of shooting and taking cover is very hard to differentiate in VR across titles.
Because the actual physical mechanics of taking cover doesn't change. The only reason it's different in 3rd person games is due to the controls. Again, I don't understand this complaint unless you just don't like physically moving.
> I think classic controller games will end up being a popular format for VR when the motion control gimmicks wear off.
I feel that this is only true for anyone who have issues with physically moving their body. I don't feel that this applies for most of the populace. Then again I could be wrong.
VR does have many issues and problems, but the issues you bring up seem more like personal ones.
You can but its not really advisable. Games are not designed to work like this. They might not break, but its contrary to the design of the game and will harm the experience in numerous little ways.
> I would disagree. It works just fine, because it's actually easier to aim with a blaster in your hand vs indirectly with a mouse. If you have issues with hand eye coordination, that is not an issue with VR itself.
It is undeniably easier to aim with a mouse. There's simply no question and you're fooling yourself if you think otherwise. As someone who can shoot decently irl and tap heads with a mouse. Alyx is yet again another example of this. Enemies don't move fast for the explicit reason that its pretty hard for most people to shoot a moving target with a gun. It's very easy for someone familiar with a mouse to do so. I would bet that most games adopt a heavy amount of aim assist in he near future.
> Because the actual physical mechanics of taking cover doesn't change. The only reason it's different in 3rd person games is due to the controls. Again, I don't understand this complaint unless you just don't like physically moving.
The controls are incredibly important. They are your interface to the game.
> I feel that this is only true for anyone who have issues with physically moving their body. I don't feel that this applies for most of the populace. Then again I could be wrong.
I think you are wrong, given the decline of health and fitness, but aside from that, we shall see again.
No, it won't. It works as designed in VR. This is a completely baseless claim.
> It is undeniably easier to aim with a mouse.
No, it isn't because it's not natural or intuitive compared to pointing a firearm with a laser pointer. There have man machine, industrial engineering studies surrounding this.
> The controls are incredibly important. They are your interface to the game.
Yes, and something to mirror real life's physical objects and environments is a lot more intuitive and natural. Again, you have a completely baseless claim.
I'm very confident that your opinion of VR highly tied to your personal dislike of physical movement. That is not an issue with VR, that is just your personal preference.
FB isn't betting on the metaverse existing. They are betting that they can make some new walled portion off it that will be so big that it will esentially be the whole thing.
Personally, I don't like their odds at all.
You can't piss of the tech entusiasts, reviewers, podcasts and everyone in between by constantly exhibiting poor judgement, arrogant behavior and blatantly invading peoples privacy, and then expect them to be excited about your next venture.
Facebook has burned pretty much any goodwill it might have had, and now it want's you to emerge yourself in it's VR world? Zuckerberg has to be incredibly delusional if he think that's going to sell.
But I guess the decline has become undeniable, but I suspect even now they're manipulating the statistics to dampen their fall.
I stopped using Facebook a few years ago, when it was mainly for a few topic focused groups. I wish there were a way to download all the group posts and comments (or at least the ones I participated in) in some kind of an open text based format I can store locally and refer to. If you know of any such tools, please share.
There’s so much information locked into the platform, and with no way for search engines to index and no easy way to even lookup information within it (Facebook search has always sucked), it’s a huge loss.
Junk is everywhere and I don’t understand how people focus on the company. Everyone here should understand how difficult it is to combat spam, especially on a planetary level like on Facebook.
I suspect I'm not the only one doing this.
I wonder if that counts unique/distinct people, taking into consideration a person with multiple accounts -- FB, IG, WhatsApp, etc.
So according to that, no.
What do you use for your friend group chats?
That's almost a Billion DAUs where a lot of business transactions happen via chat on WhatsApp.
I appreciate companies only release rock solid figures on a certain cadence, but there’s like a zillion analysts who can read tea leaves.
IMHO tech equities are pricey in general, but for someone who wants FAANG exposure this might be the bargain at Barney’s Upper East?
I hold no FB stock btw.
We have the personal data usage and integrity problems.
Then they wanted to get clean from this and did it by way of censoring and silencing what can be called conservative voices.
And now they want you and your kids to waste your life in some VR "meta" world...
Facebook does still serve a purpose. It's a popular and easy way for local communities and associations to stay in touch.
I couldn't stand Facebook though so I find myself not being able to join these conversations. Hoping something better comes along.
See FB's slide 13: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q4...
The drop this round is in the rest of the world and not US, Asia, or Europe which are flat or even up
The hot takes of Peak Facebook are unfounded, or at least premature.
Then myspace or Hi5 was the place to be
Now it's google and facebook.
How long will they last?
Nokia was the phone to have
Then Blackberry was the phone to have
Now it's iPhone
How long will this last?
Mark Z talked about S curves 10 yea to ago
They have strong presence in asia, Spain, Portugal, and South america also.
I don`t know how this new department is doing, but I will inquire about. I was in the last newsletter we received.
In many ways TikTok re-creates the best part of myspace - being able to express your personality. You can dance, make fun of yourself, post a thirst trap or make history memes. You can't do any of that on Facebook and I'm sure the fact your videos can go viral is way more appealing.
There are better ways to do that than having 500 friends on your list and hoping someone would see it and press like. It feels a bit disgusting now that people actually use it more like their Instagram feed
In any case, I now only use FB for one single niche community. If that goes elsewhere, so will I!
Not to say they have genuinely been trying new technologies with AR/VR and with their stash of cash can buy any startups in AR/VR space.
If anything FB is way underpriced IMO.
WhatsApp is not monetized yet. Though, I believe it can be easily exchanged with a different service (e.g Signal, Telegram, …) if they start throwing ads at the users.
WhatsApp is yet to be monetised but doing so is going to be tricky and messy. There are excellent alternatives with the same functionality for free such as Signal that while not a perfect drop in replacement are more than good enough.
If they fuck up WhatsApp they could lose their users very quickly. That’s the trouble with so many messaging platforms. WhatsApp is nothing “special”. I would argue the only “special” service is iMessage due to the exclusivity of iOS although that seems to be more of a US thing than elsewhere.
I think Facebook see they’re in a shit place with WhatsApp which is why they are yet to make any real changes despite owning them for years.
It is the only acquisition they have made that they haven't made any substantial changes to as I honestly think they don't know how to do so and as it is all tied to a persons cell number anyway migration is pretty painless.
People don't need to share a new username with anyone, just blast a message to all their friends with "Hey it's [redacted], I'm using $NewMessageApp now as WhatsApp got all weird with their changes". You get a few people to do that and people happily switch and the network effect takes over.
Most people are using multiple messaging services anyway so it isn't even switching just dropping.
Look at the hell they brought on with their last small change with the privacy policy. You had so much backlash to a small change that they pushed back the deadline and then dropped it altogether.
Imagine actual real monetisation. It would be the end of the service in the blink of an eye.
FB is inessential. If it collapsed tomorrow, I'd remove a bookmark.
Nope
Without taking into account fiscal responsibility, it's in the realm of possibility that FB could buy TikTok with credit + options.
What a great day.
cat /etc/hosts
...
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com
Now the wall has fallen.
You can hide many things, but sooner or later the figures have to come out: as a paradox, their "statistics" department can probably start to relax a bit now.
Although you still need facebook to login into several other things, like tinder etc.
The Market: hold my beer.
These buffoons are responsible for the spread of mis-information and should pay for the murder / unwarranted deaths caused by their desire for more views during the past two years by giving every village idiot an amplified voice!
I have reported so many mis-information post and they do nothing. They could create thousands of jobs by having more humans for verifications, but no. They want to maximize profits and depend only on AI with no appeal possible. They do not want to create more jobs to balance the transition to digital from analogue world so I am glad their stock price is getting avg'd out.
They really don't think long term of their role/responsibility to society. All their top brains and fancy school hires cant even grasp long term consequences of their short term on-steroid decisions.
Every empire / entity / co. will come to an end, it's the law of nature due to stagnation & complexity. So will this. Good riddance!
Human greed has no limits. And once someone gets a taste of that amount of wealth and power, it is difficult to not get morally and ethically corrupt, either directly, or by turning a blind eye to reality.
I'm genuinely confused.
Can someone please explain this to me?
I want to understand better.
i mean yeah if you believe their numbers
I'm praying they are forced to sell WhatsApp
My friends and family just aren't that interesting when they post stuff or it's awful content. I find myself sharing everything with people I want to interact with over text.
Zuck is a sociopathic asshole, so I hope Facebook fails miserably.
The same point applies to family, for example, and whether I need better family or not they’re all I’ve got. And Facebook has pushed them really far down whatever fringe they had a slight inclination to. Before Facebook any extreme views could be tempered a bit in family conversations, but now everyone thinks they have the weight and authority of the whole world, or at least their tribe, behind every argument.
This bait and switch is not something we agreed to as a society. We joined for the pics of partners, kids and puppies, and to stalk and ‘poke’ people we had real life crushes on. We stayed because we found a million welcoming tribes all defined by hatred and anger.
You hit the nail on the head. I have close relatives I'd never ever imagined I'd not want showing up at family functions :(
YMMV
I’ve set plenty of family members to “unfollow” so I don’t have to deal with their craziness. I’m also not above to distancing myself from crazy family members in real life.
On a different note, I joined FB as part of my college's freshmen induction class. It was "part of the course". I imagine Mark really pulled some favors from his frat bros to get that going
For me, data point of 1, I don't see a problem in my feed. I use FB to stay in touch with my friends and family all around the world, whom I would very rarely hear from otherwise, I get 0 political posts, if somebody posts something that upsets me, I mute them, yes, including family members. Even if this is your family, you are still not obligated to sign up to every one of their posts, just like you are not obligated to listen to everything they have to say in person.
Actively targeting fringe ideas to people to the exclusion of other mainstream ideas is different from the general availability of ideas and lack of censorship.
London has Speaker's Corner at Hyde park, for instance, where anyone is free to come and loudly discuss whatever crackpot ideas they have without censorship. Think it's been active for hundreds of years — but it does not overwhelm society because it allows the ideas to compete fairly on merit and evidence. Same for the salons of Paris, the tea shops of Calcutta and any other forums. The internet also had this mechanic during its beginning — anyone could say whatever they wanted on their geocities, myspace or livejournal, and all these ideas competed on fair terms with everything else.
Social media is a different beast altogether. Actively pushing whatever ideas are algorithmically calculated to achieve engagement is not a fair fight.
Imagine you had control if your feed algorithm, or that engaging wasn't automatically translating into endorsing and recommending.
While I can't comment about Facebook specifically (I haven't been on it for over a decade by now), but I've seen the same happen on many other platforms as social media has become staple of life.
I know people I've been friends with (and I mean, close friends) for almost two decades by now. I have all kinds of family members, far and close friends, acquaintances, online friends that go back to a decade or two ago on IRC channels, etc. I'm not saying every single one of them has changed, but a very LARGE portion of them has. We all have our own demons, our own beliefs, our own pet peeves and general grievances. People are sharing all kinds of sensationalist news and (let's say it) garbage all the time related to whatever orbits their belief or view of the world (or what they are afraid of). The more sensationalist something is, the more divisive it is, the more rounds it will do and the more it will get entrenched into the minds of someone.
Very often, that someone can be you, your friends, or your family. That doesn't make them (or you) bad people necessarily. I know people who I'd consider to be very good people, nice, caring, outgoing, friendly, etc. And yet they still share their demons on social media. The vitriol-induced "us vs them" articles, the fake news-style misinformation, the half truth, whatever fits their view of the world (because we simply don't know better).
It's a huge mental and emotional toll to be consistently bombarded by this kind of stuff. I don't mind talking about certain topics with certain people, what I do mind is getting consistently dragged (either willingly or not) into the same topics/conversations all the time, mostly fueled by emotional outrage (whether it is justified or not).
This doesn't make them "bad" friends. It just makes them "human" friends. You can definitely be completely and utterly emotionally drained talking with friends about topics that you care about, not in a bad way, it's just the way it is. The world is being more and more painted like it's all going to shit (whether or not that's true depends on what news you're being fed, I'm not making judgement here), and that does have a toll on you as a human.
Sorry for the long rant, but I just had to get it out there.
What I have done is "Hide all from" most of the pages that show up in my feed. So I mostly only see original content posted by my friends and very little shared from other pages like the fake news on CNN or whatever.
In the end I just Social Fixered the hell out of it all - bye bye ads too. I can’t imagine what it must be like it wasn’t something so innocuous.
They probably don’t need better friends. We need a communication medium that isn’t powered by hate.
In the past we’d sometimes have very heated discussions around the COVID situation (initiated by a friend who shares my views), but as I noticed people becoming very “aggressive” in the debate, I asked everyone to just not discuss this issue anymore. And happily everyone agreed on this.
So now we’re still all great friends, but we just avoid this very sensitive topic, which I feel is for the better. It’s not worth it to lose friends just because you don’t agree on some issues.
We do our discussions over Signal by the way, I haven’t used Facebook for many years now. Most of my friends have quitted Facebook. In the past we mainly used Facebook to organize group events (weekend get-togethers), but we use Signal for this functionality now.
This is the #1 thing, and I upvoted because you said this.
I'm also mostly a libertarian, but I think anyone who doesn't get a vaccine is extremely stupid. I'm also prone to conspiracy theories - I tend to think 9/11 was an inside job, for example. But let's say you believe in conspiracy theories, like, let's say the government wants to kill a few million people. Who do you think they want to kill? The people who line up and take the vax? No way!! Those are compliant people (according to this kind of reasoning). The people they'd want to kill - hell, the people I'd want to kill - would be the people who refused the vaccine. So they can just let them die from the virus, or let out a stronger virus next year. Anyone who thinks they're "smart" for avoiding a vaccine has not thought about what the government would do if they really wanted to kill the non-compliant people.
But having said that: I don't believe that this is all being coordinated. I think there are just a lot of countries and health agencies that all have partial information and do the best they can with it. And a lot of individuals who try to make political impressions with it. But if it were coordinated, if it were a conspiracy, then the only logical people to kill would be the ones who refused vaccination. And again, I mean this as a libertarian. If you think this is a "test run" for when a really bad virus comes out, you can bet that if you're unvaccinated for covid you're considered an enemy. I don't know why a rational person would put themselves in that position when you look at all the evidence. And I know my balls still work after having a vaccine. To me the biggest proof was Israel being first up front to vaccinate the population. (I'm Jewish). I know Israel isn't in the business of killing Jews. It's in the business of keeping Jews alive. So when I talked to Israelis who were asking why I wasn't vaccinated yet, and I had to explain it wasn't even available in America, I was sure the vaccine was nothing to worry about.
Facebook's boosted content/recommended content is what it is.
Having a friends only feed would actually save the product.
I suspect that each Facebook user exists in a different bubble. Possibly they see someone reporting frequently and think "oh great, here's an engaged user, let's show them some more hate speech to get them even more engaged".
This led to increasingly divisive messages literally showing up in my notifications that I had nothing to do with. This still happens months after I stopped responding to any of those messages.
In my experience FB is what you make it to be. It requires some curration effort but you can mold it to be useful. But you can’t just add, you’ll have to block as well, including ads - each ad source can be turned off.
For me, FB is the main source of news about local concerts. Sure, you’ll find about major ones anyway, but there’s no way to effectively track small ones. It doesn’t have to be music. FB is the easiest way to track niche local businesses, events, or groups of interest. Some of them even don’t have web sites and FB is where they post. Even when they have sites, you wouldn’t visit each of them every day to find out what is new and interesting and you’ll miss stuff.
For instance there's no way I would find about "Days of Organ music" few months ago. I didn't even know that there's a catholic cathedral with pipe organ in Belgrade, most churches here are orthodox and they don't have pipe organs.
This is just an example. There are other kinds of local interests you can only follow effectively on FB - hiking groups, sales in local music stores, environmental protests, whatever rocks your boat.
FB does come with lots of strings attached. We're all aware of that. I'm just suggesting that, with some effort of unfollowing and blocking, it can be useful.
I still use RSS, but sadly, that's not where I find news from local music school or running group. Could it end up differently if FB didn't show up? Quite possibly.
Never seen that myself. Unless you mean video.
Not surprising though. That small, focused, local niche solutions are more effective than a giant behemoth can ever be.
Yes, FB has all the data. But it needs to analyze that in tiny contexts before it can build a tailored solution for that context, first.
If you talk about real life, a "hack" that I also discovered by myself is called "grey rock method" -- for people you cannot cut out of your luck, you respond in such a generic, brief, unemotional way that there's no payoff for them in interacting/playing with you.
You might be interested to know that you can actually deactivate your Facebook account while still retaining an active Messenger account if the ability to message is all that's keeping you around.
Half of my friends like to post anodyne motivational quotes, "hilarious" forwarded jokes, pretty pictures of events they attended, and their own not-so-interesting musings. Unfortunately, that half is by far the most active on Facebook.
The overall atmosphere is mawkish. The best aspect is seeing pics of people's kids. You can't fault that.
I can. I think it's unfair of parents to post their children's images on the web, which are then being stockpiled by FB in perpetuity.
When people say "I deleted facebook because of all the hate" it just makes me wonder what kind of assholes they're friends with. Removing their facebook posts from your view just hides who they are, they don't stop being assholes. What they really need to fix is their damn social circle.
Twitter is where I go to be mad about news. I've managed to keep FB about old-friend stalking.
100% agreed that it is poorly designed. I suspect it's that design (and the bugs) that are driving away my friends.
You might lose access to things you logged in with "Login with Facebook" or lose out on some connections that are only on FB. Doom-scrolling FB is a bad idea, but whenever I log in to FB, I do it with a purpose (usually to text someone on FB)
That's a big jump from the time when typing "facebook" in the address bar used to almost be a reflex on opening a new tab.
It's wonderful really.
1. You’re worried that a script on HN will delete your comment, similar to how this seems to work on YouTube
2. You’re censoring that word to avoid “triggering” people
3. You’re copying verbatim an excerpt from the hate speech you’re referencing
I’m asking in earnest; I honestly don’t know which of those three (or any other option?) it is.
/s
My feed is updates from friends. I don't really hate speech or anything toxic.
Of course this means you need their email or phone number... But using either of those is way better than a service like Facebook.
Also, it will get messy with a collection of links.
For small audiences I like google photos the best. If you want to share something with more people (all your friends) then facebook is probably the best option.
They can reply with any comments to the email / txt can they not? I'm thinking of the scenario of sending photos to close friends / family. For larger audiences, I'd use my own platform running something like WordPress.
As for "likes" - I guess I'm of a generation where they are irrelevant to me :)
> For small audiences I like google photos the best.
Will check that out. cheers.
Not to the individual photos, unless you go with "You look funny in that photo named DSC0124.JPG". Not to mention that people often have trouble with "reply to all" function.
In practice, I can't see people commenting photo album with email.
As you say, that’s a bit weird.
Same question regarding fake news: was your page full of actual fake news suh as "Elon Musk has died", or was it full of political speech you don't like, such as "wearing masks is not worth the inconvenience"?
Sure, if you have genuine health concerns wearing one then don’t. But most of the people that moaned about it were really just moaning about being told what to do.
I had one mum in my kids school quoting the Magna Carta as a reason not to wear masks, which is simply ridiculous. And others claim that long term use of thermometers could be damaging to kids health, which completely misses the fact that such devices are entirely passive instruments.
That was the point I quit Facebook. I realised my time was too valuable to read so much stupid.
You cannot force intelligent people to read your mindless drivel just because you consider it “political”. And “mindless drivel” is exactly how I viewed the baseless debates against masks, vaccines, public health and such like.
> (removed because parent comment edited their comment substantially)
I really didn’t. I just added some personal anecdotes in a subsequent paragraph to describe why I personally quit Facebook. The body of what you replied to was unchanged.
Nobody here is advocating that you must continue reading Facebook. I'm not on Facebook. I don't advocate anyone else to go on Facebook either.
> You cannot force intelligent people to read your mindless drivel just because you consider it “political”. And that’s exactly how I viewed the baseless debates against masks, vaccines, and such like.
Nobody is forcing you to expose yourself to political opinions that are contrary to your political opinions. People are entirely free to stay in their own little bubbles if they choose to do so, but they should also be free to discuss major political decisions, such as mask mandates, if that's what they want to do.
> I really didn’t.
This is a flat out lie. Please stop spreading disinformation.
> I just added some personal anecdotes in a subsequent paragraph to describe why I personally quit Facebook. The body of what you replied to was unchanged.
Your comment originally described unwanted political speech, but implied that the speech was actually fake news. I called you out on that, my comment was roughly "That is a good description of political speech. It is not a description of hate speech or fake news". Then you edited your comment to add in a description of fake news. Specifically, you added this: "And others claim that long term use of thermometers could be damaging to kids health, which completely misses the fact that such devices are entirely passive instruments." This anecdote is a good description of fake news. So now my comment appears as if I claimed that this fake news is not fake news. So you essentially edited your comment to make me appear like a conspiracy nut. And now you're lying about what you did.
Though this is another good example of why I gave up with Facebook (and an increasing tendency I’ve noticed on HN too): conversations get really meta really quickly. When peoples views are based on opinion rather than science it’s impossible to hold a conversation with anyone because you cannot cite opinion. Thus conversations quickly degrade into meta arguments where opinions are “proven” by boring their opponents via “death by a thousand paper cuts”. It becomes as worthwhile as debating atheism with a priest (people are entitled to opinions but arguing over beliefs is never going to end well for either party).
So the smarter thing to do here is me to duck out of the conversation now.
When you edit your old comment, yes it can, and it did. That's why I removed my comment, and you're perfectly aware that this happened.
I mean if you cannot agree in that basic premise then there’s no hope in ever having a contextually specific conversation because someone can just shift the goal posts whenever it suits them and claim that was always the narrative.
This is the most pedantic nitpick I have ever seen. Yes, current events can not modify historical events, because time travel is impossible. That said, it is possible to fool outside observers (in the future) by editing a previous comment.
And no, I cannot fool outside observers because I didn’t edit your post which contained the context you defined. To that regard, I’m as much an observer as anyone else.
Honestly, I wish I took my own advice about not engaging in stupid meta arguments.
You say "Vegans are awful."
I say "I disagree 100%"
You edit your post to say "Nazis are bad."
Now the outside observer sees 2 posts, one by you saying that "Nazis are bad", and the next post by me, saying "I disagree 100%". Thus, you have fooled an outside observer to think that I don't think Nazis are bad.
> To that regard, I’m as much an observer as anyone else.
No you're not, you have knowledge that "I disagree 100%" was in response to vegans being awful, but an outside observer who comes in late will not have that knowledge.
You started the conversation
Even putting aside that I didn’t edit anything out of my post, unlike the ridiculous Nazi analogy you made, I couldn’t have changed the context of your post because you posted it before my opening comment
Or to use you’re ridiculous nazi analogy, I’m the one replying, not the one making the ridiculous nazi comments.
I only have a finite number of hours in the day, so why would I waste them reading stupid comments from people latching onto conspiracies because they need some form of belief system to cope with the chaos?
But I think there cannot be objective rules. Sure, you can scrap some vulgar words but even that could be negative. It is a problem that has to be solved on the receiving end.
I think indignation of what other people say online is the vastly larger problem than any conspiracy. What we have seen related to comments about Covid was not pretty. It really underlined why content should be as unrestricted as possible.
I’m not so sure about that. I think many of the opinions shared on social media are ones that people are passions about. Even if it’s unconsciously passionate.
> But I think there cannot be objective rules. Sure, you can scrap some vulgar words but even that could be negative. It is a problem that has to be solved on the receiving end.
Indeed. Which is why Facebook are losing members. To quote the movie “Wargames”: The only winning move is not to play.
> I think indignation of what other people say online is the vastly larger problem than any conspiracy. What we have seen related to comments about Covid was not pretty. It really underlined why content should be as unrestricted as possible.
The comments about COVID come from the same folk that follow conspiracy theories. The problem is once you stop listening to science and assume that experts cannot be trusted, you’re then defaulting to a position that there must be a conspiracy. It doesn’t mean all folk who are curious are worshipers of Qanon but the fact remains they still believe there is a conspiracy.
People don't get vaccinated for different reasons and one very sensible on is not to make yourself a subject to "science". Because that does not exist and even statements from scientists need scrutiny, their work even depends on it. Any serious scientist will confirm that for you.
You cannot generalize critics as "folks that follow conspiracy theories", as a matter of fact that is why we see less and less trust in officials. They need criticism too.
There’s a gulf of difference between accepting that scientific opinion is divided; and thinking experts cannot be trusted.
Conflating the two is simply silly because the former is being open minded to new evidence and analysis, and discussing those findings. Where as the latter is being closed minded to all formal evidence and analysis and refusing to discuss the science. To be honest this feels like a bloody obvious distinction that shouldn’t need to be made yet people do seem confused by it.
> People don't get vaccinated for different reasons and one very sensible on is not to make yourself a subject to "science". Because that does not exist and even statements from scientists need scrutiny, their work even depends on it. Any serious scientist will confirm that for you.
Confirm what? Your comment here it gibberish.
If people have a medical reason not to be vaccinated then they obviously should not be vaccinated. However that just means it’s even more important for all those who are able to be vaccinated to be vaccinated (to reduce the overall risk so those at risk are protected by proxy).
Saying “I don’t trust the science” is just a bullshit way of saying “i don’t understand science but also too lazy to learn it” and thus not an acceptable reason to avoid vaccination.
> You cannot generalize critics as "folks that follow conspiracy theories", as a matter of fact that is why we see less and less trust in officials. They need criticism too.
I can and I did. ;)
Yes, science does need criticism. Which is exactly why it already happens. We called it “peer review” (in fact you said yourself that scientists don’t always have a consensus so you’re contradicting your own arguments now).
The problem is people like yourself just assume those reviewers are also part of the conspiracy whenever that peer review doesn’t align with your assumed position. There’s literally Jack shit one can do to convince a person that due diligence has been done if that person has already convinced themselves that something isn’t safe and anyone that tells them otherwise is a liar.
In contemporary culture I see people trying to ban diverging opinions. There is no depth to it. So nuance is not permitted. I don't see people blankly refuse or forbid statements of experts. There is not a rift between the closed and opened minded people. If so, both sides must be close minded.
> Confirm what?
That any scientific discovery must hold against scrutiny, it is as simple as that.
> If people have a medical reason not to be vaccinated
There is a huge political component. I am vaccinated but have called an anti-vaxxer because I don't support mandates, which are now pretty much off the table anyway. People that called for it should be glad most people are not that reactionary to refuse any further discussion. Really glad.
> I don’t trust the science
Nobody is saying anything like that.
> I can and I did. ;)
That is pretty unscientific of you as a the diagnostics of hate speech.
Yeah, I can’t say I entirely agree with banning of opinions either.
> I don't see people blankly refuse or forbid statements of experts.
Really? The EU referendum in the U.K. was literally based around the phrase “so called experts” as a way of undermining reports from experts in finance and trade so MPs could focus on the more emotive topics of sovereignty and immigration.
You see it again with COVID about how experts are hiding the truth. Etc etc.
Lately there has been a huge anti-movement against trusting experts.
> There is not a rift between the closed and opened minded people. If so, both sides must be close minded.
I see what you’re trying to do but that logic doesn’t work. You can have a rift with both sides being open minded and still disagreeing.
The fact that science promotes debate and peer review suggests it is open minded. The fact that conspiracies depend on distrusting sources means it is not open minded. One is open to exploring new ideas and research. The latter pretends to be open minded but actually only accepts ideas that confirm an opinion already held.
> That any scientific discovery must hold against scrutiny, it is as simple as that
That’s literally what already happens.
> There is a huge political component. I am vaccinated but have called an anti-vaxxer because I don't support mandates, which are now pretty much off the table anyway.
That doesn’t make you an anti-vaxxer. Whoever called you that was clearly being more emotive than factual. Objecting against vaccines is being an anti-vaxxer. Supporting freedom of choice is being a libertarian.
> > I don’t trust the science
> Nobody is saying anything like that.
I’ve seen people literally say that regarding the COVID vaccines.
> That is pretty unscientific of you as a the diagnostics of hate
Not really. That comment you quoted was me being flippant (hence the wink). The paragraphs that followed that remark explains the rational behind my remark.
Also even if you disagree that people who believe experts are conspiring to deceive them aren’t conspiracy theorists (I can’t see how you’d disagree with that statement but it seems you do), that still doesn’t constitute as “hate speech”.
By whom? Not progressives. It is a standard right-wing a way of attempting to distract from actual progressive statements like “white people, including those who aren't personally racist, are privileged by institutional racism” or “White identity is grounded in racism”.
Also, your second statement maybe applies to the US, but there are many countries where white people are not the majority, or where there were virtually no other races than white. Saying that e.g. Norwegians or Italians are privileged by institutional racism is absurd. I am from a post-communist country that was always 99.9% white, saying that “White identity is grounded in racism” is absurd and of course totally racist.
Since we are discussing a distinct American center-left faction’s position on domestic group relations, I don't know why you'd think the positions ought to apply to conditions elsewhere.
If you are talking about a whole race of people, but you actually mean only a specific subset, then it is up to you to define the context, not up to the reader.
(And even in that case you will still probably end up with a racist generalisation.)
Sticking my neck out a little, and leaving out my personal positions, I think you are interpreting "White identity" as "any identity held by people who are white", where dragonwriter meant something more like "holding White as an identity"?
Any way you spin it, it is not ok. The color of my skin is my immutable characteristic, any derogatory statement about the whole white race will always be wrong.
You could reasonably argue that I have misinterpreted dragonwriter, that dragonwriter's interpretation doesn't match that of the other progressives who use the phrase, or that there are other problems with that interpretation (I don't, here, even endorse it). But your particular rant is off base enough that I don't think you understood it.
Almost nobody was posting anything, mostly it was shared posts. If it wasn’t for Facebook killing forum and small websites, more people would have left years ago.
And there are so many other places to get news nowdays...
1. Create an instagram account to follow just one account.
2. Follow an account called @mosheh. It's run by a former CBS News Producer [1]
3. 1x or 2x per day, go through his stories.
The UI is more and more horrid though on FB and Instagram with every update. My ability to do the most simple things is extremely frustrating, and I don't understand how they believe those changes help to inspire deeper engagement, It's getting really difficult to see any value in either platform as they shrink organic engagement of each post to 1-2 people when I have over 1k followers. I refuse to pay for ads just to reach the audience that has already chosen to follow me. Instagram shows a mile of ads and posts from accounts I follow on every news feed before my desired content now, it's totally outrageous.
Likes are completely worthless across the web right now, they mean absolutely nothing... and the stats aren't even accurate on so many of these sites, they're really showing desperation by pushing their user base away, I honestly can't believe that "brilliant minds" are at the helm any more... It feels like they sacked the experienced development minds and are just left with interns, marketers, and psychiatrists on staff. Something's either got to fail or change majorly before year end or I'm going back to IRC and local message boards for good, social media has become a total waste of energy.
Infinite scroll is just...laggy. I don't have this issue on Tiktok (which to be fair I also don't use often). The news feed used to be curated for me specifically, but now it seems to be the same recycled content I see on YouTube recommendations.
I don't want to see the same sh*t over and over again, show me something unique and new.
Some of the subs are just so helpful and so good.
I don't know what good reporting does for anything...
I did catch a 30 day ban for saying that 'men are trash; I'm going back to dating women' though.
I deleted my account, to the extent that one can (which is… limited)
I believe there's something much more sinister than that going on with that feed. I believe it's specifically programmed to fish out your mental vulnerabilities and bully you with content that touches on exactly that.
After a few weeks it feels like a superpower "wow, so I can just use facebook for 5 minutes every couple of days and easily stop using it? Unbelievable!"
I "deleted" my FB after they acquired FriendFeed (still the best social network I've ever come across) back in 2009.
I was puzzled, then, to receive an email in November last year asking if I had tried to log in. "Impossible", I thought, "that account was deleted!". So, I visited Facebook, and because my old username/password were still in my password manager, I was able to log in! Imagine my shock to find my old profile, still there with it's old profile pic, my old connections, etc.
When will "delete my account" actually mean my account is deleted?
(The final kick in the nuts to this story is that within 2 minutes of logging in, I get a chirpy, "Welcome back to Facebook!" email. Fuckers.)
They're then allowed to keep data for legal reasons (tax, legal intercept, etc) but not beyond.
Deleting FB account is slightly more complicated. After you have deleted it, don't try to login for months to check out if it's gone.
To permanently delete your account:
1. From your main profile, click account in the top right of Facebook.
2. Select Settings & Privacy, then click Settings.
3. Click Your Facebook Information in the left column. If you have Facebook access to a page in the new Pages experience: Click Privacy, then click Your Facebook Information.
4. Click Deactivation and Deletion.
6. Choose Delete Account, then click Continue to Account Deletion.
7. Click Delete Account, enter your password and then click Continue.
That said, I certainly haven't touched it since 2009 to check if it really was deleted.
EU has much stricter rules.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that I did everything FB allowed you to do to “delete” my account the first time. When I did it the second time, it’s not like it was more complicated or hidden than the first time, but it actually worked.
My conclusion is that, today, FB has a weird split between deactivating and permanently deleting your account (the latter takes more effort), but 10 years ago was nothing of the sort. They just let you think you deleted your account but didn’t actually do anything. Or maybe there was a bug with account deletion back then… or maybe they had an outage where they had to restore some stuff from a backup and my account got “recovered” in the process.
But the important point is that FB didn’t even acknowledge it with a message like “do you want to re-activate your account?” on my login in 2017… it was as if I never deleted it in the first place.
Removing Facebook from my Browser bookmarks etc. improved my life a lot. However I didn't delete the account as some shops unfortunately update their opening times etc. only there and especially in current pandemic world that sometimes is needed to check ...
Happened to me exactly the same, but I don't remember the password and I can't "delete" it again.
But in general, ALL of the sticky sites aren’t…sticky anymore. I took 2 weeks off at the worst of it and it did an amazing job of breaking the feedback loop.
Facebook tried to take over forums and mailing lists, their market was full of scams (which had me going round and round with Paypal and the bank when ‘Sally’ selling an iPad from Massachusetts sent a receipt with an email from a Guy in Turkey.
Then they started poking around with VR and Meta and man, I really don’t want to use this headset if I’m forced to log into Facebook and you’ve got 6 outward facing cameras, Zuckerberg.
Good. Can’t come soon enough.
A brief history of reddit:
>We want to democratize the traditional model by giving editorial control to the people who use the site, not those who run it.
— Reddit FAQ 2005
>We've always benefited from a policy of not censoring content
— u/kn0thing 2008
>A bastion of free speech on the World Wide Web? I bet they would like it," he replies. [reddit]'s the digital form of political pamplets.
— u/kn0thing 2012
>We will tirelessly defend the right to freely share information on reddit in any way we can, even if it is offensive or discusses something that may be illegal.
— u/reddit 2012
>We stand for free speech. This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform. We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse).
— u/yishan 2012
>Neither Alexis [u/kn0thing] nor I created Reddit to be a bastion of free speech
— u/spez 2015
White supremacy or hate wasn't really a thing on reddit until the past few years. The controversial content on reddit were r/jailbait (which I'd say a majority of the community agreed with; although many did begrudge the shifting of the overton window on 'we host anything that is legal'), but then "social justice" became a thing and a new crowd of redditors seemed to want to de-platform people.
I don't have a time machine, but I suspect if you polled a majority of redditors in 2017 whether they'd support the de-platforming that is happening today, a majority would vehemently disagree.
But my impression is that being the central hub of one of the most aggressively hateful online pro-Donald-Trump communities in 2016 attracted a larger number of abusive users and increased the visibility of the problem.
they're a tiny part of the population online and in real life
you can mute users and stick to your own subreddits because you only see what you choose to follow
you're feeding into the narrative and creating the problem of censoring everything
You Could NOT escape the stuff towards the end of the Trump administration. It wasn’t only Reddit.
“Far-right atheists”. Okay.
The place used to be far more liberal both in the sense of openmindedness and in the sense of people having the ability to tolerate people they didn't actively like. That atmosphere is mostly gone.
This might solve a lot of problems, but it would create issues on the edge, like r/pics content that may not be overtly political but clearly has an agenda.
Personally I use Reddit exclusively for political flamewars on one account, and in-depth technical content on another account.
I’m starting to feel pretty unwelcome, though, when it comes to anything “misinformarion” related. Once you get banned from one subreddit, if you have a post reported on the same subreddit from another account, then both your accounts get banned site-wide. Combine this with the dragnet, unsolicited bans that some mods are sending to anyone who posts in certain subreddits and you have a real chilling effect.
The average IQ on Reddit is also about 110, which is just boring in most cases. When you can predict the top comments on a thread, reading them is probably a waste of time.
This is the result of Citizens United; when elections are decided by who has the most money, it’s a zero-sum game until politics have consumed the totality of our lives.
In 2022 you have the choice of a) "suppressing free speech" or b) "platforming racists" and there is no middle ground and no way to win. You can't pass the buck to moderators.
The choice did not feel so stark in 2005.
The major problem with most internet platforms is the boundaries and user controls are non existent. Everything is open for everyone to see and no one can control who is in their network. Only a handful of moderators and platforms have control over both visibility and membership/rules, and those controls are limited and primitive.
Feeds which magically select content users are supposed to like and the attempt to eliminate user settings to make platforms more accessible and magical contribute to this problem. Creating effective and easy to use self moderating tools is a difficult enough problem on its own; when you also have to fight a lot of entrenched design philosophy, it's even harder.
That's not a solution in the cases when those people, are using the platform to gather a group of angry people and then will go and kill you and your family and those who look like you.
Now, I'm guessing this isn't a problem in _your_ case -- but it is, for some others (see e.g. FB and Myanmar, or WhatsApp lynch mobs).
Another problem is when the one's you don't want to hear, are spreading propaganda supporting a want-to-be-dictaor. And then eventually they succeed, because those who didn't like the dictator, just ignored them (let them spread the propaganda unhindered). -- What's the likelihood that the US is still a democracy in 30 years. (Btw I didn't downvote your comment)
I'm not saying self moderation would eliminate bad groups. I think it would better contain them. I think having more siloed, fragmented, and naturally evolving online ecosystems would prevent any of the problems you mention from spilling over and infecting the entire culture.
I don't think any of those risks you mentioned are solved by centralized moderation. I think they're made worse, as everyone becomes incentivized to fight for control of moderation and is pulled towards ousting the other to recreate the groups those in power naturally feel most comfortable with. I firmly believe the social dilemma people are currently in is a result of the entire world trying to make rules for one big room, and no one is happy because people come from vastly different contexts that could never be properly accounted for in one room and one set of rules.
Allowing people to make their own decisions about association and information is far more scalable, democratic, and corruption resistant than trying to make platforms that appeal to all and respect all people from top down moderation. It allows people to let off steam privately and meet in designated rooms in the middle. That may seem terrifying given some of the people and groups out there. But I think recent history is a pretty good indicator that trying to forcibly educate and moderate people that are deemed a problem backfires severely. Malicious and violent groups can and should be contained and watched by others, but trying to prevent association and people deciding whats good and whats bad for themselves drives more people to opposition and affiliation with potentially violent groups than they would otherwise associate with. If people are able to express certain ideas without being automatically ousted from certain groups and affiliated with extremists, that lessens the pull to extremism.
There is no perfect solution, and I do not think that every forum should avoid top down moderation or that certain associations shouldn't be watched or potentially dealt with in the real world if dangerous enough. I just think more user directed moderation is in general the least worst option.
What's worse: a group spreading messaging encouraging mobs to go out and kill people made up of those who voluntarily choose that group over others in a world where other groups can counter message and organize and defend themselves, or a group that controls global messaging encouraging mobs to go out and kill people and bans all counter messaging?
What's worse: propaganda supporting a want to be dictator spreading in a forum of voluntarily associated zealots which bans and ignores criticism, but has no power over alternative group organization, or propaganda supporting a want to be dictator spreading on a global platform that bans and ignores criticism of all other groups?
Is a two party system backed by billions, elaborate social media timelines (from experts of sociology, psychology, K street, and NGOs) even close to a democracy at this point in time?
Regards of which hand you consider the correct one, we have deeply flawed versions of the world being marketed and sold at unprecedented scale and scope.
Imagine if you worked for a company and every 4 years workers voted to keep or replace them. What if the companies main customer had a controlling vote?
/rant
Nobody argues that reddit is constitutionally bound to host free speech. The point is that what's right in a public forum is also right for a company. You appear to be focusing on an irrelevant technicality or parroting the "they can build their own Twitter" defence, but neither of those is relevant here, the only point being made is that free (independent of constitutional obligation) speech is good, and should be broadly supported by platforms
I don’t think we’ve established that, and I’m fairly confident that the ACLU doesn’t think so either for that matter.
If corporate speech, or individual speech had to embrace all viewpoints without restriction it would cease to be independent at all wouldn’t it? In other words, protecting the right of individuals to express the viewpoints they choose to is in fact the more democratic ideal isn’t it?
Separately, please refrain from speculation about what I or others _appear_ to be saying. If I intend to say something I have no problem doing so.
There are definitely approved forms of bigotry that are tolerated on just about every social media platform. I’ve never seen a post promoting death to unvaccinated moderated, for example. I really hate the idea that because a site has racist users that it would be considered a racist platform. That’s throwing the baby out with the bath water.
On sites like reddit, I can ignore hateful subreddits just as easily as other topics I’m not interested in. I don’t think it’s reasonable that there is an expectation that every platform police everything that might offend someone and I don’t know of any platform that attempts to. Certain bigotry is just less tolerated by admins than others.
r/conspiracy is an interesting example. Opposing views on just about any topic are accepted and there’s genuinely a lot of critical thinking and research that goes into many of the comments. Sure it’s filled with crap posts, loonies, and paranoids, but constructive, respectful discussion is had about topics considered too taboo for most other subreddits. And they are maligned by most of Reddit to the point where certain subs will ban you just for subscribing or posting to it.
Disclaimer: of course racism is awful and stupid. I’m not advocating promoting racists or misogynists or any other hate group. I just think the benefits of open, free discussion out way the drawbacks of hateful, stupid discussion.
In 2022 you have the choice of a) "suppressing free speech" or b) "platforming racists"
Sadly, what passes for moderation at most places nowadays is even worse. It's hideous and stifling. If the cranks make places too annoying to stay at, woke moderation makes places feel pointless to participate in.
I once tried looking through their archived code base to find when they made that change but couldn't decipher it. It's possible they never showed authors the red background at all.
Reddit gave mods the ability to shadow ban about 5 years ago via automod [2]. Now even crowd control can remove comments [3]. These features would be fine, in my opinion, if users could discover when their comments were removed.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/jp4j76/google_a...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/qhpr6i/crowd_contr...
I get it, and I don’t have to keep attempting to contribute to it.
Are you a teen or a young adult. I am guessing you are in between age of 35 - 45 because, I am that age myself and have started weaning off of social media lately. The dopamine rewards are just not worth it.
I have, however, moved on to saner places like HN.
- 0 minutes of facebook
- 0 minutes of Instagram
- 0 minutes of Twitter
- 20 minutes of Telegram per day to catchup on messages
- 10 minutes of Matrix
A few years back the aggregate was easily 10-12 hrs per day (rest were spent watching movies and writing code) . Nowadays my brain automatically will close the sites if I spend more then 2 minutes on them.
But it’s not just social media, I lost my appetite for movies, tv shows too.
Most of this purge was unintentional , however now that it’s done. I’m glad. Other than that I come on HN once or twice a day to have fun and comment and read stuff.
I wouldn’t say HN is more saner then other social media, most of the peers I engaged with in the more popular social media apps were equally as nice, amicable and fun to talk with.
But these days I mostly spend my days reading story books, blogs, write code, make drinks and cook food, and solve fun puzzles that I design.
Who knows, maybe it’ll all change to something else in 2 years again.
I hope you have a lovely day !
I most definitely do not need or want a VR immersed version of that toxicity.
You don't have to login into Facebook to have it build a profile of you: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profi...
What blows my mind are all of the blatant scam replies on sponsored content. You'll get sponsored content from, say, Bloomberg or CNBC, and half of the replies are cryptocurrency scams. I've even seen top replies that were 'ads' for witch doctors that will cast spells for you if you send them money on Venmo.
It makes both Facebook/Meta and the sponsored brands look terrible.
How come we don’t see scathing articles on NYT about TikTok but on WSJ? Has this become a partisan issue (Trump wanted to ban Tiktok)?
Or just block them. Maybe that would be better.
It's not just a kids app anymore, if you start dismissing content aimed at teenagers, you quickly get into a bubble of content made for more mature audiences: daddy jokes, bloopers, political content and more. It's surprising the number of creators above 20, 30 and more years old there.
In my country, there are even congressmen and runner-ups that post content there daily.
Anyway, the problem with it, in my opinion, is how content is promoted in the app. The next video is just a swipe away (and every time an user swipes too early, you loose "points"). It encourages sensationalist and alarmist content, the creator must keep the audience engajed without swiping it, so the more chocking, the best - just like any other social media platform nowadays. And that's where the fabric of society starts ripping.
Content can be said to exist or not exist on Facebook, and that's usually it. Sure they monkey with the feed, but it's still essentially user-derived.
TikTok effectively exposes one interaction: get next.
What that returns is completely at the mercy of whatever TikTok decides it should be. They've optimized for virality. But it would be pretty easy to tweak that and optimize for something else.
I think researchers are starting to notice mass psychological phenomenon specific to the platform already, though maybe 'tiktok tics' just sounds nicer than any of the other social media networks and 'tics'
We literally almost banned TikTok, and statements were made about the necessity of doing it from the President of the United States. For weeks. Almost resulting in a government mandated forced sale.
I have heard of quite a few among my circles who got locked out.
They hurriedly pushed out something that did not work in the first place.