My 16yo daughter says FB is for old people and nobody in her age group is using it.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
So...what is the appeal of teenagers again? Is it being "cool"? What can I buy for cool?
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.