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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

It's amusing that one of the concerns is Google employees leaving or potential candidates not applying at all because they'd rather "get rich by having a popular fb app." Just what happened to Facebook as a platform, were they just completely superseded by smartphone apps?

Incidentally, the decline of their platform is one of the reasons why I believe it is unlikely there will ever be a serious Meta third party App Store competitor on iOS- Facebook isn't very good at managing a developer community.

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I think devs were more cognizant of the platform risk on FB, and the developer experience was absolutely pants. I dreaded every moment working within their platform, maybe it's different now. As well FB apps were necessarily less interesting, because they were so tightly integrated into FB it limited the potential experiences.

It just wasn't worth it when a developer could reach people on FB with ads instead, and point to their mobile app, where you can attempt to fully capture the value of the customer rather than just rent them from FB. Forgive me for the business speak there, I'm no longer in that space thank the stars.

Facebook pretty much gutted their API after privacy issues surfaced, predictable that people would stop building apps on their "platform"

They decided to dodge the spammy app problem by limiting the capabilities of apps until all kinds of apps, spammy or not, stopped being profitable, and then people stopped writing them. Seems to have worked for them.

Decline happened when FB started suppressing messages from apps on the feed and started prioritising news links and later images and videos. It also coincided with decline of flash, so a lot of apps like Farmville were re-built in HTML5 or as a native mobile app. These apps then used FB as an auth mechanism. The changes in FB APIs didn't help either.

Twitter envy was the cause of a lot of bad business decisions for Facebook.

They were really jealous of twitter being the source of “trending” topics on news broadcasts and wanted that role, so they boosted links and news articles rather than updates from friends, they even experimented with making all posts public.

It’s like they don’t know that their strength was that you could connect with people you know and care about, but they wanted to be another “shouting in the wind” platform.

If I know these guys I imagine a very clever statistician ran the numbers on this call.

My guess is that Facebook realized that being a "shouting in the wind" platform is an excellent way to retain what I'd call the "low engagement" tail end of the distribution.

i.e. the explicit goal was to provide content for those without all that many actual friends on Facebook.

I look at Facebook now and it seems like the connect with friends part of it is very much secondary to just driving groups, marketplace, and all the parasocial paraphernalia of the modern internet.

Which is of course a very profitable thing to do if you're in the eyeball minutes business. All those features are after all, there for users 24/7. And don't rely on the vagaries of end user content creation.

So true! A lot of folks in India shifted to FB from Orkut because it was private by deault compared to other networks at the time. They destroyed that base assumption in two years.

> started prioritising news links

It probably helped their short term metrics but it really seems like this decision was terrible in the long term.

I and a lot of people I know began to disengage when Facebook mostly became people I didn’t know so well posting political crap.

> I and a lot of people I know began to disengage when Facebook mostly became people I didn’t know so well posting political crap.

True. But would more FarmVille spam in the feed have been any better?

I deactivated my account months ago, and would like to see Facebook just disappear. Facebook should not have a place in our future imo.

They discovered it was more profitable and less hassle to focus on selling ads than trying to be a 'social OS'

The highlights from the 2021 F8 conference look- riveting

https://about.fb.com/news/2021/06/f8-refresh-developer-confe...

> Instagram is not only a cultural and social hub — it’s a place where people come to discover and connect with brands.

im so glad i never even tried that one

Yea you discover stuff and get connected by blackbox recommendation algorithms. No thx.

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