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Comment by SrslyJosh | Hacker News Reader

Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/

I've tried to type out several pithy comments, but the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.

Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac, but it's not on the menu anymore because Taco Bell had a few really good quarters, so McDonald's decided to pivot to tacos. Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted.

Edit: To clarify, this example is contrived and the details are not the point. The point is that Facebook offered something to their users, spent years and billions of dollars making sure that as many people as possible got it from Facebook, and then decided to just yank the rug out from under all those people to chase the fairy tale of endless growth.

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> Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.

Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers. You and I aren't Facebook's users; we are the ore Facebook has been mining at a cost approaching zero for over a decade and selling at a huge markup to its actual customers. But now the mine is playing out. We no longer cost Facebook zero to mine and the advertisers are beginning to realize the gold (us) is no longer 24-carat because nobody under 30 uses FB any more.

Like any mining entrepreneur when the mine begins to play out, FB is panicking. They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks.

None of it will work. FB will keep publicly saying "everything is fine" until one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the bag.

> one day they will simply slink away in the middle of the night leaving several thousand mine workers unemployed and holding the bag.

When that day comes, the moment Facebook and Meta are declared dead I will go out, order the most expensive bottle of champagne, and celebrate all night. Future generations of an advanced technological society will look back in horror and disbelief that a small cadre of privateers were allowed to run amok dominating the cultural communications of billions of people. The harms to individuals and society will take decades to reckon with. The lost opportunities for us to evolve instead of "amusing ourselves to death" will be one of the great questions of the future. "Why, while the planet was burning", they will ask, "did people spend all day sending each other selfies?"

The problem is not Facebook or Meta. The problem is the disgusting business model of targeted advertising coupled with algorithmic curation of content to increase ad impressions. Facebook happens (happened?) to play that game perfectly but it's not limited to them by any means and another player will just take its place if Meta dies.

I'll keep my bottle of champagne for the day targeted advertising is regulated away, either on privacy grounds or on "Section 230" grounds (if you're curating content to increase engagement it's fair that you should be considered an editor and thus lose Section 230 protection and start being liable for any inflammatory content you promote to increase engagement).

Its funny how little attention your post got. I consider it the most important take on this subject. This is not about Facebook. It's about a corrupt and destructive business model that reflects the insane world we live in today. When that model goes away, it will reflect on other models that revolve around deceptive business practices. So more to the point, when ethics becomes an integral point of doing business, Then I will celebrate the real achievement of our time.

> when ethics becomes an integral point of doing business, Then I will celebrate the real achievement of our time.

This has rarely been a priority in capitalism.

That's not how Section 230 works: it's explicitly designed so that some editing does not open you to full liability for user provided content (but it's common to think it does the opposite). https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/no-section-230-does-no... explains.

Why do you signal out “targeted” advertising? Would it be a different story if they advertising was not targeted? I think it would probably be an even worse junk land.

Social Media is not going away anytime soon. It'll just take a different form. Just look at TikTok

Why do you consider TikTok to be social media? Isn't it just videos shot in a smartphone aspect ratio + comments and a clever discovery algorithm? Is YouTube also social media?

> Why do you consider TikTok to be social media

A reasonable definition of social media is that it refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and/or exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. "

In other words, roughly: a medium in which media created and consumed by the crowds vs. institutions.

Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media for a longer description.

> Is YouTube also social media?

Yes. "YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

Yes? Of course? I don't think there is a solid argument against HN being social media either. Same goes with Discord, Telegram, and Signal.

They are all media that you interact with and also interact with others via. The distinction is made with television/radio, where interaction is purely one-way, and is therefore not social media.

> dominating the cultural communications of billions of people

I think it is much worse than dominating. Let me try: as a FB user, your "communication" with your network is not only mediated by FB, but actively manipulated to such a degree that you're no longer communicating directly with individuals in your network. When we give up the ability or the pattern of communicating directly with each other, bad shit happens.

Well, should really look into the history of communication technology in the 19th and 20th centuries. Television, the telegram, and radio were all dominated by private cos that crushed open competition at every opportunity. Do you ever give that any thought? I recommend The Master Switch by Tim Wu if not!

We have tiktok now which is even worse

There is no reason to celebrate

The day meta is declared dead will be the day some other corporation has released an alternative to Facebook/Instagram/etc, probably worse. Hardly anything to celebrate. The cat is out of the bag.

I'm really curious to know what you think that "cat" is ?

Are you thinking that digital technology is irrevocably corrupted and hereafter can only be employed toward abusive and manipulative ends?

Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear?

Or are you alluding to something within the collective psyche, making a social-anthropology statement of sorts, that people, having tasted the ruin of apathy, nihilism and decadence will not recover in spirit and build a more positive technological world?

Or something else?

I'm genuinely curious what you imagine is the powerful force that underwrites malevolent entities in the digital realm?

I've said it before and I'll say it again - social media is not the root of the problem here. I believe that there could be a great social media platform that respects its users and their privacy. But the minute you let marketing and sales into the room the game changes. They are the ones that see their users as the advert dollars, not the people building the platform. The highly paid executives whose only goal is to squeeze every last penny out for their own personal gain are the issue. This is a systemic problem in technology today: when the goal is profit first, the end user is lost as the target market.

I'm working for a small company currently and am watching the same thing play out on a much smaller scale. The company was growing organically at a good clip. We've had zero customer churn in 6+ years and service some of the largest companies in their respective verticals. Company fires the current CEO based on board recommendations, hires a CRO who was in sales at Oracle for 7 years, CRO brings in his overpriced underlings to "manage", CRO starts refocusing all concerns around the sales process (starting with making everyone spend an inordinate amount of time learning/relearning MEDDPICC) and tying up hours of the work week in unproductive oversight meetings. Now I haven't been here long but I've seen this play out before. CRO will sit here for 2+ years and milk it into the ground blaming everyone for every failure but himself. He'll even throw his guys under the bus if needed (which is why they're there in the first place - ownership buffer). We're starting to see product issues because of the focal shift internally and the distraction this guy is creating. It's so unfortunate - I've yet to hear the CRO talk about a customer outside of the subject matter of revenue. It's sick and twisted. These types of "executives" are narcissists through and through and they are the toxic seed that kills great companies.

You forgot the part where after 2 years they are shown the door but with a huge payout and glowing references ostensibly because "We don't want to ruin their careers" but actually: We don't want the market to know we hired this idiot and it took us 2 years to work it out and we don't want to be sued by their high-priced lawyers.

Then they take their "success" to the next company and the cycle repeats.

I suppose the technological implementation of a sort of “bad faith” ethos is the cat, here. And as tends to happen with that sort of degradation of values, other organizations pick up the technique since the bar is lowered. That’s my 2 cents anyway.

> technological implementation of a sort of "bad faith" ethos

Indeed, that's what the parent commenter said.

What I do is look at all those historical "slippery slopes of bad faith" that didn't survive, and ask "Why not?". What changed in society and stopped that?

Child labour was set to explode in the industrial revolution. Kids as young as 7 or 8 worked in factories. At the time it would have been reasonable to extrapolate that in a few decades all children would need to be employed in mills and mines. And we can talk about slavery, and disenfranchisement of women, and many more things in the same way.

To take a counter-example, the proliferation of cars on the roads is something we have not been able to stem through reason alone. I think this sets up a sense of "technological exceptionalism" in which theories of determinism currently dominate. In my opinion this is a very immature (Level 1 civilisation) view of things.

But when we look at all the malevolent trajectories that were corrected, it always begins when we name it. Naming a problem (acknowledging it as undesirable) sets in motion the progress towards overcoming it.

I think we are living through precisely that age with digital technology. We are in a process of naming, qualifying and understanding new harms. We are starting to apply the same progressive models we have for race, gender and public health, to technology. The course is set. It might seem time is not be on our side, but the industrialists of today are no more powerful than those of yesterday against the tides of society.

> Or are you supposing that because we have allowed some companies to damage society through abuses of technology, that the situation can never be remedied. No laws can ever be brought to bear?

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the United States? Absolutely yes.

It’s not that profound. Humans have become addicted to sharing every moment of their lives through social media, and then watching what other people have shared. Most people no longer have time to themselves since they feel like if they don’t share what they are doing they aren’t doing anything. And if they aren’t doing anything they have to keep up with others (FOMO). Meta will only disappear when someone else creates an even more engaging and therefore malignant platform.

You think the whole world will sign up for something like facebook, knowing all we know now, again?

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers.

You're confusing users with customers. The customers are advertisers. The users overwhelmingly aren't.

Well, the only active users I see anymore are engaged in advertising even if not necessarily for profit. (Self) Promotion always was one of the draws of fb.

Really? I have not used FB in like 5 years. One of the things it had for it compared to Instagram and Twitter is how it was not celeb or micro-celeb oriented.

Has that changed?

In my experience, the people doing self-promotion on FB are generally not trying to be famous, they are trying to drum up customers for their own or their friend's business.

So no one is really trying to get you to "follow" them, they just hang around neighborhood groups to see if they can find someone who needs a caterer or a contractor.

Speak for yourself, i know loads of people who use it to keep in touch with family and friends and posting updates every once in a while.

There’s a lot of stuff wrong with FB but it’s fundamentally a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing)

> a useful thing where there’s no great alternative (being vaguely aware of what not-so-close acquaintances are doing)

It has also basically eaten Craigslist where I live (Baltimore)

My wife and I were not Facebook users five years ago, but our neighborhood organizations are on Facebook, and so are the best places to find secondhand stuff. So we're Facebook users.

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers

Anyone who's tried to use their advertiser tools is unlikely to agree with this. Hard to remember any software I've used with a worse user interface in recent memory.

Google ads is pretty bad too but facebook's business portal / ad manager / whatever they call it this week almost seems to be designed to be a nightmare to use on purpose. I sincerely hope a player comes along to disrupt this market with a product that is actually nice to use and offers decent customer support - these shouldn't be unrealistic wishes!

Haha, they AB tested on there "customers" to get them to overspend and dark patterned even the imperators salon. This is hellarious.

Actually I think this could be the reason. Given the sufficient number of A/B testing, it may turn out the more complex the interface is, the more likely the customer is likely to (make the mistake of) spending more.

There's no way to disrupt that market without first owning the audience. Facebook and Google can afford to build awful ad management software, because that's the only way advertisers can reach their audiences.

Perhaps it's the classical case of enterprise software - the people who make the call to spend on Facebook ads mostly don't have to work with the advertiser UI themselves - they have underlings for that.

I need to explain the user interface of Facebook to one of my clients but it would be a lot easier if the interface didn’t change every week and it didn’t had 4 points of contact for settings all in different places. I guess design by committee is at work here.

My guess is that (just like other big players) they have a team for each part/page/section of their platform. There is no cohesive product vision and no product principles (promises) to the users.

Experimented with it recently to see if we could advertise to people with an interest in our audio plugins. Ended up with a bunch of likes from mostly single mothers in Mexico who didn't seem at all interested in spectral audio processing :'(

Remember teaching people how to navigate and use that is a whole industry for them too.

Pretty sure you can do courses and get certified in it.

> Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers.

> You and I aren't Facebook's users

A user is someone who uses a product, by any reasonable definition.

Advertisers are certainly (commercial) customers, but the average person IS a user of Facebook.

> we are the ore Facebook has been mining

This I do agree with, my own metaphor has been harvesting rather than mining (like in the Matrix or in Jupiter Ascending). But being something mined/harvested does not preclude also being a user.

"Facebook cares a great deal about its users--advertisers."

The elephant in the room is advertising tracking. Nothing to facebook matters. If I as an advertiser can't see what I am paying for, I am leaving. Advertisers DO NOT want to pay for impressions - they want to pay for conversions (clicks/installs/etc). Without a way to see if a particular ad spend converted - all ad spend ends. Facebook could now be doomed. Apple has changed its policies [1] to help its users to remove advertiser tracking. Mobile has taken over almost all impressions.

"They're throwing whatever they can think of at the wall to see if anything sticks." They are beyond fucked here. Whatever they create, apple is blocking tracking. So new products/features do NOT matter. They need a way to figure out tracking - I don't have a solution (besides leaving and just using apple store iads).

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/27/22405474/apple-app-tracki...

https://i.imgur.com/xECOsSr.png

> nobody under 30 uses FB any more.

well, aren't older eyeballs more valuable anyway? Like more disposable income, maybe more free time for those retired? The mine might be empty some day in the future, but it doesn't seem to be the case right now

I'm no advertising expert but IIRC marketers tend to like the younger demographic because even though older folks have more money they also are wise enough not to spend it on stupid shit they don't need.

Unless you're selling a new kind of golf putter or a very expensive prescription medicine for high blood pressure. Then you want the oldsters.

Wasn't there statistics indicating the group with the most amount of expendable money are women in their forties?

I mean, the big bucks in advertising are coing from established companies anyway right?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an ad from an established company on Facebook. It’s always fly by night junk or scams.

Occasionally I find myself having lunch someplace that has daytime tv on. That’s where I see the ads for pharmaceuticals and insurance.

Younger people have a longer lifetime value than older ones

> nobody under 30 uses FB any more

As someone the wrong side of 50, I can actually tell you that practically none of my friends in my age group use FB any more either. For my non-techie friends, we're all in whatsapp groups.

The only thing that keeps me on facebook are sports clubs that I'm a member of, organise a lot of activities via facebook.

Yep, 47 here, and no one except a couple of right-wing, anti-immigration activist "friends" seem to actively use Facebook anymore, out of hundreds. In fact, that's the main reason why I and many of my friends don't use it — it's around 90 % conspiracy theory, and hatred towards government and minorities now, and it's super tiresome. Everyone else is long gone.

In my opinion it's not the UI that is the problem; it's the decision they made to allow all nutcases with their nutjob theories to run rampant, in order to make a quick buck out of peoples' outrage.

The signal-to-noise ratio gets lower and lower with every "overhaul" of FB. Without even looking (and I can't be bothered either), it feels like 1 friend post to 10 or more group or ad posts.

They don't even care about their advertisers, they knowingly perpetrate click fraud (and lying about video metrics). They don't care. Because Zuck doesn't care, he has contempt for everybody, advertisers and users alike

Even though the original product is dead, they bought WhatsApp and Instagram, which are far from dead

Instagram’s incessant design tweaking, it’s algorithm adjustments which now give preferential treatment to “reels” to an absurd degree and the expansion of advertising on the feed (I’ve seen people write as much as 5x more) all positively reeks of desperate product managers. Instagram is going the same way as facebook it just has a bit further to go

This is endemic to Metas culture though, they’re a metrics driven company so metrics drive their design decisions.

No one important at Instagram is fighting for the vision of what IG is. They’re just fighting to try and claw eyeballs away from emerging platforms and their success is being judged on how many people they get to push on these new formats. They don’t care if it’s at the detriment to what made their product great to begin with, because all they’re looking at is “how many reels are they watching. How many stories are they posting”.

Thing is with this strategy because there is no overall vision and no one standing up and saying “we shouldn’t add this” you get the equivalent of a burger restaurant serving sushi and tacos too but their burgers just suck now.

Crazy seeing it happen as the competing experiences encroach on screen space. IG now has Snapchat at the top and TikTok “ad breaks” in the feed. Twitter now has Clubhouse at the top. Etc.

Algorithmic feeds are the harbinger of doom for social media. They all get immediately and progressively worse when it's implemented (and it always will be because that's the business model).

Instagram isn’t dead, but it does appear to be doomed. At the moment all it does it buy them a bit of time to find a way out, which they almost certainly won’t (as they’ve had a longer period to do so already).

WhatsApp isn't dead, but it isn't really monetisable. We'll see how Telegram Premium goes - personally i have it, but i doubt many people are willing to pay for a chat app with tons of free alternatives.

I'm happy to pay for chat, just not for Telegram. I'd absolutely pay for Signal.

You can donate to Signal if you want to support them. In the settings menu there's an option to give a one-time or monthly donation.

I'm genuinely curious, what are the reasons you wouldn't pay for Telegram? Is that only a matter of preference, or does Telegram have some critical issues?

You can donate to Signal one-time or monthly. They make it very easy with Apple Pay.

I'd be very willing to pay for a good chat app.

But if Facebook turned around and would say "hey if you all start paying us we can drop the whole evil thing" then yeah they'll get my middle finger. They just have lost my trust.

In Asia, Line seems to be doing well selling stickers which I guess can be a way to monetize a chat app.

Instagram is moribund. People's accounts are being stolen left and right, users' feeds are full of unasked-for shit, and "stories" are an absolute mess.

Facebook and its properties are dead. Good riddance.

TikTok is next, of course. Just ask Vine.

I see that they have raised the price of the Oculous Rift.

Daft move unless it isn't sustainable or they want to phase it out.

The original product isn't dead or dying. Maybe in 20 years.

This is a good point. For a company this big, the difference between the 2nd derivative and the 1st derivative can be many years.

Ig definitely on its way out

Won’t the bag be in a virtual world though? :)

I doubt it. Facebook may have issues but they aren't going to disappear anytime soon.

Some of us are old enough to have been through Hi5 and MySpace....

And some are old enough to have read millions of predictions of death of IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google and FB.

and Sun, Netscape, etc. Just because some of these predictions didn't happen doesn't mean a lot of them did.

Sun Microsystems appeared solid. Apple _did_ almost die. IBM is only a shadow of their former self (IMO, the original IBM _did_ die). FB and Google are still young in comparison.

I have no stake in either, but IMO Google is more likely to survive than FB. FWIW, both have high quality staff that will bail if the growth stalls.

The old IBM really just sold itself off in little pieces.

What's left is a few pieces that have no idea what they want to be but they just keep doing what they do because the brand name assures them customers.

Some of which we were actually right about.

By the way, Apple only survived thanks to Microsoft money and being reverse acquired by NeXT.

True, but despite MySpace once being dominant, it’s peak scale was a tiny fraction of where Facebook is now.

MySpace was popular for some specific English speaking age groups mainly. Facebook is basically everywhere but China.

My parents who still refer to Google Maps as Mapquest are even on Facebook. It will take a pretty big screwup to flush out those types of users (not early adopters).

Your parents are the only ones left on Facebook. As long as that demographic can sustain it, so be it. But nobody under 70 is going to be on there much longer.

Actually, red-state cousin-humpers might still be on there a while longer. They have no place else to go, after Trump's predictably shambolic attempt at creating a competitor.

Yeah. I'm "remembers netgoth.org.uk IRC regularly having to add 'yes, livejournal is down' to /topic" years old.

Myspace was never a ~trillion dollar company.

A matter of how long it managed to stay around.

Sounds awful, but it could be worse. At least the Facebook-managed McDonald's is trying to chase after what most people seem to want. A Google-managed McDonald's would just shut down, even though everyone loves McDonald's, because somebody at Google figured starting a new fast food chain is the best path to a promotion.

I've enjoyed the analogy so adding onto it:

Google would open up 5 competing, different burger places next to each other and then close them all down a year later, confused that none of them did well enough. All to open a new Taco stand on the other side of town and claim it's got the same great food you liked before (it doesn't).

Apple would sell exactly one kind of burger, which is great but costs $20. The wrapper is rose gold or space grey. Only Apple-certified condiments can be applied to the burgers, and a packet of ketchup is $5. Each year the faithful queue outside for the privilege of obtaining the latest burger.

The burger is nearly always great, but occasionally it tastes strange. You are not allowed to see the ingredients and the staff suggest you might be able to improve the situation by re-wrapping and re-unwrapping the burger. This does nothing. The senior staff suggest leaving the burger in the fridge overnight and trying again in the morning. This does nothing. None of the staff actually know how to make a burger, but they will swap your strange burger for a refurbished burger for only $18.

Microsoft would license their burger recipe. All the licensees would sell unique, subpar versions. They'd also for some reason have a $10 billion contract to supply burgers to the military.

They would also stop providing plates with the meal. They would be available for an additional charge.

and drinks would come in cans that require a special adapter but the adapters are so expensive you need to carry one around with you so you can drink when you’re thirsty.

and more and more people would simply accept that great burgers cost $20 and come from Apple if you want a decent one. While there are some other burgers that sound great at a lower price point, they occasionally give you e-coli. Mediocre burgers at a low price are still widely available.

I would pay $20+ for a fantastic burger, especially if all other burgers made people sick.

I love reading those.

That being said, I can make a pretty damn good burger myself. Sadly, can't say the same about Google/Apple/Microsoft products.

The silver lining is if you pay for it it pretty much will always taste decent.

In'n'Out burger?

They'd also switch how one orders food every 18 months, and have them migrate to the new way of ordering food. Food ordering in gmail, food ordering as an app, food ordering using a kiosk, then back to an app, then merge it into the wallet app because why not.

And the food is delivered using an old-school automat format where you can see people on the other side but never talk to them if anything is wrong.

The five wouldn't compete, one would sell buns, another patties and lettuce, one would have a door so confusing that nobody knows what it actually sold inside, another would sell burgers but advertise itself as something completely unrelated, and the final one would be an acquisition that immediately shut down for a complete rebuild while its staff are fired or reassigned to the other stores.

"Hey, As some of you know, we've been working hard on a complete redesign of BurGer, and we are happy to announce that it's ready! The new GerBug is square, with cheese and bun swapped places. All is this to give our customers a new great experience. Truly yours, the GerBur team."

AWS would provide one large kitchen in backstage for all of these people to cook. You’d be like “Well I could just buy the appliances” but regulations mandate a certain way of cooking with autocleanup of desks, that can only happen in the AWS kitchen, unless you want to hire dozens of workers to do menial tasks.

I don't think it's what people want, per se. I think it's what some metrics say people want. Might be good for "engagement", but bad for retention in the long term. People were on facebook for the features facebook had.

> People were on facebook for the features facebook had.

People were on Facebook for the people that were on Facebook.

And they were on Facebook instead of MySpace because Facebook worked better for sharing news snippets. Then facebook changes to the "most interacted-with posts", then politics took a dump on everypne's sharing from about 2015 onward, then facebook changed to a bunch of spammy videos from "content creators", and most of everyone gave up and left.

I lost track of the number of people saying (myself included) "Give me all my friends posts, in chronological order", and facebook just ignored us and slowly removed the ability to do anything close to that.

Ironic how Google tried Google+ and failed because Facebook had all the users and content. If Google had just shelved theirs as-is for 10 years and pulled it back out now, people would flock to it because it would actually be a feed of your friends/family posts in chronological order, with user-customized filtering, again.

Anecdotally I quit Facebook in 2016 but of my friends and family that still use it, I would say most simply use it for marketplace. They may still view the updates that people still post to see what's going on but it doesn't seem to be near as about keeping in touch (I'm in the US).

One of the features of Facebook was the people who were on Facebook.

Well, what people want if you define people as humans between the age of 18 and 24 and ignore the rest.

> I don't think it's what people want, per se. I think it's what some metrics say people want

This is true and realistically this is what any business should be chasing. People don't know what they want is something I sincerely believe in.

I do agree that people are good a voicing problems, but not desires.

Engagement is a pretty shitty metric when used in isolation though. I've worked at places where changes that increased engagement were considered successful at higher levels even though the support team knew the increased engagement was caused by increased confusion and friction in using the product.

You missed out how Google would also take your order but when you get to the window there is just a piece of paper stuck to the glass telling you:

There was something wrong with your order. Please do not try again as we will ban you.

They will also lock you out of your car.

Well not quite. Shutting it down takes effort. First you have to let it sit and rot away until it becomes a meme. Then you can squeeze another round of promotions out of the deprecation work.

A meme is what is popular (= a unit of culture).

"Memetic Unit of Culture" would be an excellent Banksian Culture ship name.

Edit: Got to be a GCU really.

Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this? You go out for a Big Mac

Your point is 100% valid, so don't consider this a disagreement. It is merely that McDonalds has changed, and it annoys me.

I went to the one on El Camino near Oregon, and waited 7 minutes to have my order taken, and 14 minutes more for my food. Why?

Doordash, and others.

https://nypost.com/2022/02/14/doordash-to-penalize-mcdonalds...

This is a pivot too, from restaurant to delivery as a primary business model.

But, just like facebook, mcdonalds borked this. Its whole business model was fast food, and really the only reason I ever went there.

They could have added more cooks, and another cashier, keeping the responsiveness and speed of old, keeping their food fast for walkins.

But instead, drop the old, and now I can go to a real restaurant, order a burger, and get it made and on my table faster.

Good job McDonalds!

> They could have added more cooks, and another cashier, keeping the responsiveness and speed of old, keeping their food fast for walkins.

McDonald's hasn't been fast food for a long, long time -- and this has nothing to do with Doordash/delivery.

In the 80's and 90's at least, all food was made ahead of time. There were rows of burgers sitting under heat lamps, and once you paid the cashier, they would grab your entire order in under 30 seconds and hand it to you. It was fast food.

But as competitors started making better-tasting food freshly prepared (e.g. Wendy's made all hamburgers to-order), McD's had to catch up. So the burgers under heat lamps are long gone, and you have to wait 5-15 minutes for your food to be made. You get a number on your receipt and walk over to a pickup area now.

Also the 7 minutes to have your order taken has nothing to do with DoorDash/delivery -- it's the fact that McD's raised their minimum wage a few years ago, so they can only afford 1 cashier instead of 4-5, and they want you to use a kiosk/app to order using a touchscreen.

McDonald's didn't bork anything. Their hot, fresh quarter pounders are now almost infinitely tastier than the old shriveled ones in dried-up buns baking under a lamp for 30 minutes prior that we ate in the 80's and 90's. But that comes at the cost of waiting for them to make them fresh.

With how much McDonalds has raised their prices in the last 2 years, I don’t understand how they can even be competitive on DoorDash. When I can get actual food for less money and the same exact effort, why eat McDonalds?

Until very recently I used to be able to get a full meal for ~$4, but now it’s hard to get out for under $12. The only reason to ever eat McDonalds at this point is the “it’s there” factor when I have left the house.

Huh, they're still ridiculously cheap here in .uk still ... though perhaps only if you pick the least profitable things off their menu.

Triple cheeseburgers reheated in the microwave with a brick of extra mature cheddar added between two of the patties first remain one of the most cost effective "my depression is trying to eat me but I really should still actually have food" meals I've figured out though. (the trick is to microwave it just enough to soften the cheddar then cut it in half, stupidbrain finds a whole burger upsetting but half a burger twice acceptable, yes I know how little sense that makes logically but the entire point here is "working around my brain being irrational.")

I'm in Germany, and I've always liked McDonalds. I enjoyed eating there maybe a handful of times a year, even when doing so was considered "uncouth" by the majority of the people I know.

No more. Why? Because they've stopped selling burgers.

They've switched almost all of their restaurants to a "made to order" model, wherein they assemble your order on demand from warming trays, instead of producing them ahead and storing them in this huge heated cabinet.

Now the result looks exactly like the product shot on the menu, but is so lukewarm that the cheese hasn't even melted. That's not a burger, that's a at best a strange sandwich.

The margins are better on "premium, made-to-order" food so they do this to justify their increased prices. Unfortunately this is working well for them, and at scale, people don't seem to care about the extra wait: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros....

Another way to look at this is that McDonald's is making customers feel like they're getting restaurant quality food for less money. Personally, like you, I miss the cheap fast food.

I don't mind that, even if the "experience" might be lost on me. What I do mind is the food being cold.

Made for you MFY has been around at Macca's for a long, long time. It's not a recent change.

It was around long before all of the delivery service apps, and before smartphones were a huge thing, even.

> Made for you MFY has been around at Macca's for a long, long time. It's not a recent change.

Don't know where you're from, but you gotta remember that Macca's is not quite the same all around the world. In Europe as an example, you can notice clear differences between the different countries Macca's. So even though MFY exists for a long time where you live, it's very well possible that the other persons local Macca's only recently-ish changed too.

I guess that change is not only noticeable between countries, I'm pretty sure you'll get a different experience if you either visit a big restaurant in a city vs. a smaller restaurant on the countryside.

I noticed the last time I went to a McDonalds a huge sign on the door advertising that they're on DoorDash, Uber Eats, etc., basically saying "don't come here!"

Really short term thinking if that's true. DoorDash/UberEats might not be around forever. Its also not clear whether people will order the same amounts if an actual recession rolls around.

By prioritizing DoorDash over in-store customers, you're just destroying your long-term value prop and brand.

Plus there's one small detail: you can still enjoy e.g. a pizza that's not hot anymore; other food (Indian, Chinese, ...) can mostly be kept hot without losing its quality. With burgers and fries (especially McDonalds), you have to eat them hot, and trying to keep them warm during delivery results in a soggy mess that's not enjoyable at all anymore IMHO.

I'd say it's long-term thinking. McD's is a franchise, and paying commercial rents at the levels they're at now is not economically viable in a lot of cities, especially if your walk-in traffic is mostly delivery service workers.

They'd probably make more money if they moved spaces into a ghost kitchen and cut out walk-in traffic entirely.

What if 80% of your revenue base comes from food delivery services?

A more important reason that McDonald's has become slow is that they've switched to just-in-time assembly of burgers. They used to have an inventory of burgers, and for most orders, you ordered and the person taking your payments immediately assembled your order. Now there is no buffer, and everything is made fresh.

I would disagree with the term 'fresh'. They still fry the patties etc in advance and leave them heated in plastic trays.

They just moved the assembly process closer to the customers but the ingredients aren't any fresher.

They switched to MFY instead of pre-made stuff (in New Zealand at least) around 2002-2005 or so? It's been like that a long time.

The reason for the slowdown is purely just the delivery apps. Staff doing payments & cooking/assembly are usually different people unless it's like 3am on a weekday.

So far as I've seen here in .uk they still have an inventory and most orders happen that way. (given them being a franchise this may not generalise beyond the locations I visit, of course)

All the locations I've been to in the UK in the past 3 years have the warming trays and don't keep (and so dispose of) fully-prepared inventory.

At the same time they did this they changed to touch-screen ordering and panelled off the 'kitchen'.

Wait times seem much longer to me, I assume they prioritise drive-through.

Does 'fresh' mean 'cold', like burger king?

The issues is that until the delivery business model runs into a brick wall (which IMO is inevitable), we'll see this continue. It's hard to blame them because being slow to disruption can be fatal to a business. It's just hard to tell at the beginning which disruptive ideas will end up taking over, and which ones end up as duds.

There is a local company (morecambeeats.co.uk) that was set up during the covid lockdowns to provide -just- centralised online ordering to local businesses that already had delivery drivers.

I first learned about them because I ordered a kebab on Just Eat and my order arrived with a flyer inside saying "please use them next time, they charge us less."

The site is honestly a bit janky and regularly annoys me slightly ... but only slightly, and I'm happy to deal with that to have all the revenue go to a local company and my favourite food places - and the cost is at worst identical to the venture capitalist subsidised companies and sometimes lower.

I have a possibly misplaced hope that they'll survive the collapse of the VC players. I intend to live in hope anyway though because (a) I much prefer my money to stay local (b) they're the easiest way I've found to order from the chinese place with the best prawn toast I've ever had.

If they disappear at some point I'm going to have to go back to phone calls and paying cash on delivery, and while I love the places I order from enough to do that if I have to I'd really rather not.

Curious why you think it is inevitable? The convenience of having the whole city available for delivery for consumers, and for restaurants to have access to a broad base of on-demand drivers and these customers, seems like an intractable modern day invention.

Recession means less money available for a luxury service like delivering your food.

The cost right now is subsidised by VCs to get everyone to switch.

With the incoming recessions VC will spend less money, especially on a business model which doesn't feel novel anymore.

It's not. This was working in Columbus Ohio since at least the 1990s...and probably elsewhere and for longer. Just didn't have an app.

Their business has gone up. If those customers were to show up in person you'd be in line behind them parking, in the drive-thru, in line with them fiddling for coins and change and ummmm-ing on what to order.

as someone who has managed the front lines recently at a fast food restaurant, companies like Doordash have been a boon for the in-house efficiency

I remember being in Bilbao, Spain wanting to eat fries and a cheesburger in a Burger King. They didn't have anything like that. All I could choose from where potato wedges and weird Spanish style burgers with way too much stuff on it. Is it too much to ask for fries and a regular old hamburger in a Burger King nowadays?

Have you considered that what's a "weird Spanish style burger" to you is likely a regular old hamburger to someone who lives in Bilbao, Spain

Now that you mention it, that town was in deed pretty weird. good point.

> the bottom line (to me) is that Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.

Wouldn't a consequence of this be that Facebook would be losing users in drovers? And yet the data seem to disagree. This is a type of take that feels very "inside baseball" and fueled more by the feelings of its proponents than any kind of empiricism.

That's a fair point.

I think another perspective is that this is a case of businesses chasing (or being forced to chase) endless 'growth'.

Facebook is likely optimising to increase engagement and revenue.

But in my humble opinion the Facebook of the early 2000s was close to perfect in terms of use. Obviously leaving the product the same wasn't going to drive that revenue and make the careers of all the employees.

I wish Facebook remained as the platform I could jump on a couple of times a week to see what distant friends and my Grandma was up to. For a while they somehow managed to have just the right balance where it seemed like everyone on the planet would eventually sign up.

It felt like this was a huge step forward in how the world communicated.

Logging onto Facebook in 2022 is a cesspit of flashy videos and clickbait posts. What a disappointment.

I continue to think that the difference in taxation between capital gains and dividends was a market distorting error. "Not growing noticeably but being steadily profitable" is IMO both underrated and overtaxed.

Facebook is still that for me - I don't follow groups and my feed is 99% far flung friends posts about their lives - we've also moved past the "look, everything in my life is perfect!" phase and people are more honest.

I removed half of my friends and almost all of my information in a digital konmari exercise last year and Facebook is still like 1/3 ads, 1/3 videos I don't care about (and never asked for), and 1/3 actual posts or comments made by my "friends". It's an adridden wasteland.

I have exactly the same feeling. I wonder if there is something like "Facebook 2008" ? It seems like LinkedIn is slowly taking that spot

Probably Snapchat, as it was the last of the social networks to focus on person-to-person communications and group chats. 2008 Facebook was more about "stalking" someone's profile and looking at who was commenting on their "wall".

The place where everyone communicates like they're sending a job application and most of your inbox is just recruiter spam...? That place is like Facebook in '08?

For me Facebook is a bit like ancient Discord. A few companies and hobby groups are on there which I follow.

> cesspit of flashy videos and clickbait posts.

... that people in your network (re-)post, right?

Users who believe they can get something out of Facebook that speaks to their vanities or insecurities will ignore being disrespected or not cared about by the platform. Moreover, many of those users will accept the terms because their use of the platform is free. Some users might be consciously aware of the fact that the disrespect and lack of caring is mutual, and accept it that way.

"Facebook doesn't respect me or my needs, but I likewise don't respect Facebook or care about its needs. so it's kind of fair. It's free, and I think I'm getting more out of it than it's getting out of me. Plus almost everyone I know is on there, so ..."

This.

> Wouldn't a consequence of this be that Facebook would be losing users in droves?

Do we know that they aren't? Certainly my Facebook usage has dramatically changed since 10 years ago, and I would say that's true of the majority of my network too. I still use Messenger and I still log in about once a week or so, so I imagine I still count towards Monthly Average Users, but still: there was a time in my life 10-15 years ago where my entire social life was mediated through Facebook specifically, and now if it disappeared tomorrow, I'd barely notice other than Messenger. All my social media "attention" is on Instagram and Twitter now.

It depends how you measure it, right? I now only use Facebook for events and that is because there is nothing else that competes. Everything else in the Facebook app is awful, and even events is increasingly user-hostile. I recently deleted instagram (an app I actually used to really like!). But I still count as a daily active user in their reporting.

I wonder what their internal engagement metrics look like. I bet Facebook’s feed engagement (which is their primary ad display) on the Facebook app is way down, because the feed sucks. Instagram risks doing the same with this frenzied push for engagement.

> I now only use Facebook for events and that is because there is nothing else that competes.

This is a big reason I still use Facebook, and am extremely unhappy that they keep removing features :(. I used to be able to browse events easily for random dates in random locations on my phone, a feature that now only seems to exist on desktop... but, even then, it doesn't seem to support not having a search term :/. When you combine that with fewer and fewer events being on it due to fewer and fewer people being in the target market of using it it is in a death spiral.

They just posted their first net user loss - so maybe not "in droves" but their username is certainly declining and will continue to do so without drastic change

Where are you getting this information? AFAIK, 2Q22 earnings (and metrics) are released tomorrow. The whispers I've heard are that any loss of M/DAU is contained to Europe and is caused by Russia going offline.

Given that they lost users in the final quarter of 2021 that’s a remarkable time travel machine your whisperers seem to have invented.

> Social media giant Facebook has seen its daily active users (DAUs) drop for the first time in its 18-year history.

> Facebook's owner Meta Platforms says DAUs fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December [2021], compared to 1.930bn in the previous quarter.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60238565

Ah yes, the familiar "everything is Putin's fault" refrain.

He's a bad guy and invading Ukraine is horrible, all the usual caveats. But Putin under every rock and behind every bush being responsible for every toothache and hangnail is getting old.

Russia bans Facebook and Instagram under ‘extremism’ law:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/21/russia-bans-fa...

facebook losing users is a bad thing?

> but their username is certainly declining

You can't make any claims about Facebook's position based on a single quarter's result.

Especially given we are in the most tumultuous period in the last few decades.

The 80s covered the end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Iron curtain, so surely you're not including that decade.

The 90s covered the fall and breakup of one of two world powers, and had a gulf war and the breakup/war in Yugoslavia, so that's similarly rules out.

The 00s covered terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and London, changing air travel worldwide, starting wars and inspiring more terrorism (Madrid, Mumbay). Oh, and a financial meltdown compared to the Great Depression. So that's probably also not in your "last few decades".

That leaves the 2010s, which cover (amongst others) the start of the corona pandemic. I guess you're including that event in your "recent decades".

Plenty omitted from the above, such as famines and wars in Africa, news from Latin-America, "where's my vote" in Iran, the Arab Spring, Rohinga & Myanmar, ...; in short: we've been in a couple of tumultuous decades for a while now.

Even if so, the point here needs more information: are they going to a different platform which respects them and cares about their needs? Or just some different-but-same thing?

It’s not that easy. This is life and death for Facebook. TikTok is really taking over and is a force. It’s also a Chinese company and so they can’t buy it. They are forced to compete, either they do this or become fully irrelevant

Facebook is dying, but not because of TikTok.

Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.

It doesn't help that their core code is a steaming pile of bloated dung that doesn't seem to be tested by anyone.

> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook

a) No evidence they are dying. All we have is a single quarter's result i.e. statistically meaningless.

b) No evidence that staying true to the original Facebook is the best strategy. Unquestionably, Stories has been a popular feature in both Instagram and Facebook ecosystems and perhaps certain features from TikTok will be the same.

But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.

There's an army of users out there accustomed to and just simply want to see what their friends are up to and posting.

Are they as sexy as the bajillion TikTok users out there? No.

Are they enough to build a solid business aruond? Yes.

Would facebook ever consider stepping up to the plate that built their core business again? No, because Facebook management sucks.

I don't give a shit about algorithmic recommendations and of horse-shit force-fed happiness content don't anticipate ever changing that. Many of my friends are the same way.

What ever happened to servicing the long tail?

> just simply want to see what their friends are up to and posting

People keep saying this is what people want. Show me the numbers that it's true.

Because when Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube etc. all move to this model and stick with it the evidence is clear that it's not want people want.

I used to see posts from 50-100 friends/family each week. Now I see posts from about 5 of them. I barely use facebook because it crashes my iPad browser (I refuse to install the app) and because the feed is so packed full of autoplay videos I can't stand it. Facebook is "dying" for myself and my entire sphere of friends/family but of course that's just an anecdote.

Ive wondered about the drop in activity. Like is it less busy because people are using it less and it's boring or w/e or are the 20year olds who were posting party pictures everyday and having friend group drama just aren't doing much anymore and grinding through life without shareable stuff

That’s perhaps also the bit that Facebook investors/management ignores. You cannot have over a billion users and expect any significant growth. You also have to accept that any change you do might alianate a small percentage of your existing users.

You may very well be right. Facebook is adjusting their offering to keep a certain segment of users. That will eject another group, or at least reduce their engagement. That’s fine, if it ensures profitability for the next five years.

It’s just interesting to be part of a group of users that aren’t intersting to the social media platforms. Which in a way just confirms that the social media part of Metas business isn’t actually important to them, only the ad revenue that it might bring.

I think it's really difficult to tell if they are dying or not. I don't think MAU or DAU gives the full picture as it doesn't tell us what people are using it for, what sort of new accounts are coming online (are they real people, bots, businesses or what?), and how active people actually are. Are people logging in for easy auth or are they spending more or less time actively browsing the site.

You're right that HN is not the right place to judge this. I will say, as someone who works with high school kids, almost none of them have seemed to use it over the last 4-5 years.

> But there is plenty of evidence that the opinions of HN, Reddit etc. often do not match that of the broader public and so should be taken with a grain of salt.

There is a lot of biases and nonsense in here and in the news being spread around over the death of Facebook (Meta) or even the beginning of its death, which has been greatly exaggerated.

They will be around for another 10+ years.

> No evidence they are dying. All we have is a single quarter's result i.e. statistically meaningless.

But their first down quarter (for users) does say something. No one would be talking about this if it hadn't happened.

It's a quarter where we are seeing an inflation explosion, COVID and international uncertainty which is causing recessionary behaviour. Companies across the IT sector are cutting jobs and revising forecasts either because of actual or expected drop in revenue.

Can't think anyone serious would look to derive any meaning from a single data point in this environment.

For all we know the entire DAU drop could be from Ukraine and Russia alone.

Did you reply to wrong comment? Did you just have a Google alert for Facebook dying?

My point is you should dispute the original claim that it is life or death for Facebook instead of the subcomment running with that theory.

I think Facebook is doing OK, but they have issues breaching the younger democratic, which is worrying them.

Yeh lol at the facebook is dying bot. I left social media 5yrs ago (no fb, never used tiktok). I remmeber MySpace and how i left it for FB.

You cant build a buisness on a bubble. You can build a bubble and extract money from investors, but honestly, the only people who use facebook are doing it because they are addicted and likely not internet savy. Its like hooking people on sugar. Except fb doesnt own the sugar, and cant only buy up the competition for so long before your no longer the hot stuff investors belevied.

Facebook is a fad. Social media is not, it has overtaken traditional media in less then a decade. Social media will morph, it is not static. You cant own it. And Facebook is not the defination of it anymore.

When I started using Facebook it wasn't a newsfeed, it was just a personal homepage with a photo album and a bulletin board attached.

I'd love to have something like that again that everyone uses, but everything is about goosing the influencer economy now rather than letting me socialize.

I'd love it if Meetup had a threaded discussion board with a way to pin photos and video. All my social networks would use it.

That's actually what Google+ was with circles before the morons in charge forcibly bundled it into Youtube and killed it. Google should have had some patience like the people over at Musical.ly and built an audience organically rather than shoving unwanted garbage down our throats.

You're basically describing myspace.

I honestly liked MySpace. I think it was superior to Facebook in every way. At least you could enjoy some cool music on someone’s page when you visited it. The page was about them.

That's basically what Facebook was (though really it drew more from Friendster). As I remember it, the big appeal of Facebook over MySpace was that the interface was clean and that people felt like migrating from MySpace to The Facebook was a way of shedding their high school selves and reinventing how they presented themselves for college. So it was still loose but looked a bit more "adult." But they very much were viewed as doing the same thing.

It almost sounds as if there is a niche for that!

BTW have you tried dreamwidth.org, a fork of the venerable livejournal.com? They look as if 2005 had never ended,in a good sense.

There isn't. Many companies e.g. Path, Google have tried and failed to build a social network that focused on more personal relationships.

They simply don't offer enough value over say a WhatApp group.

I remember the introduction of the News Feed and how creepy and invasive it felt at the time. Here’s all the interactions you previously had to look for explicitly, now pushed in front of you. It was a harbinger of things to come.

> (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.

I don't think so. TikTok is vastly more addictive and fresh in its content. How much content can your circle creating in a day? No more than 20 posts I would say? If facebook stays being facebook, they will die anyway.

Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with, it is a social network, but tiktok is not. Tiktok is the new TV, with endless contents. I follow zero people there, but still I using it the right way.

I think the core issue here is that Facebook can't afford to merely "do OK": they have to "make a gazillion dollars and take over the world with an ever-increasing source of bottomless revenue" or they are considered "a failure".

> Problem in facebook right now, there isn't enough people to interact with

FB took care of that by removing the chronological time line. As soon as it went away from a time line of things that happened to the people I love into a addiction stimulating ever refreshing list of flashing images it took away the interactivity. It became more of a consumption site place and they're leaning heavily into that (with Instagram too). This then means that content creation is moving from users you know to professionals (people playing the algorithm).

Attention is zero-sum. If TikTok is winning, someone else is losing. TikTok now is what Facebook was 10 years ago.

Facebook is where my older relatives social network. As soon as it became a place where people over 40 went, it lost its appeal to the young people that Facebook is really after.

It's not just that the people over 40 are on it, it's that your grandmother comes and leaves confused comments about unrelated topics on your friend's posts.

this is why they bought instagram

Smartphone attention is not zero sum. Average daily usage could increase with some novel super-addictive app or platform. Smartphone usage probably went up during the pandemic.

"The pandemic boosted global (smartphone) data consumption by more than 30 per cent in 2020" [0]

[0] https://theprint.in/tech/the-covid-19-pandemic-has-led-to-an...

"Average daily usage could increase" And at some point you just need to increase the hours in a day...

> Facebook is dying because they stopped being Facebook. If they gave what's left of their userbase what they actually wanted (chronological feed, seeing friends posts, not seeing spam, more ways to interact (bring back pets, gifts, superpokes etc)) they'd do ok.

I have no horse in this race, but why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there?

They clearly saw TikTok as a direct threat, and, probably fueled by thousands of data-driven tests, confirmed that this change results in more engagement and keeps more people on their site for longer.

What you seem to want from FB is likely what a minority of its older userbase wants, but wouldn't make graphs go up and right as much. They need to attract younger generations and new users if they want to do that.

> why do you think you know what's better for FB more than the thousands of smart engineers and PMs working there

doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions

> doubt they're the ones making the big strategic decisions

Of course not, but I doubt that the ones making these decisions are ignoring the metrics that the thousands of smart engineers are generating.

All the large companies are able to afford extra staff whose job is exclusively to generate and analyse metrics.

It seems a reach to conclude that the company pays thousands of people for a specific output, just to throw that output away. It may happen to one or two of them, but certainly not to all of the people generating the metrics.

My theory is that it's also the behavior of users that has changed.

In my own network (age brackets 25-40), I rarely see any people posting updates or uploading pictures, which was common 5 or 10 years ago.

On the other hand, Meta managed to keep the younger generation audience by acquiring Instagram, but apparently, it failed to acquire the Next-Bing-Thing (Tik-Tok)

Facebook is a sinking ship. It's hard to turn that around.

It seems like it would've been easier to go after TikTok with Instagram - which is basically the same product, growing, and still has some brand value.

Maybe other people's feeds are different (admittedly I don't do much on it), but almost all I see on instagram are screenshots of twitter, tumblr, reddit, and tiktok videos. Very little content original to the platform.

If you don't much on it that seems right. That seems like generic content. I used to get a lot of that, now mine is the stuff I follow. Mostly art and people I know in real life

They are, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32233415

Meta already knew Facebook would sink someday. As they have Instagram, they don't care and Meta will be around for another 10 years to extract more from Instagram and their other unused platforms.

I'd expect the hype and growth around TikTok to peak once their parent company IPOs, as more corporations, advertisers, mainstream media accounts, move in to the platform to ruin it just like they did with the rest of the other social networking platforms, especially for YouTube and Instagram.

If they don't IPO soon, TikTok will get much worse for their users. Either way, the users will eventually get annoyed by TikTok's changes, pushed and boosted by the company.

> once their parent company IPOs, as more corporations, advertisers, mainstream media accounts, move in to the platform to ruin it j

> If they don't IPO soon, TikTok will get much worse for their users

So, if they IPO TikTok gets worse and if they don't TikTok gets worse? I don't see why bringing up an IPO matters.

Meanwhile, it seems unlikely they'll IPO soon if ever. They apparently raised a 2 billion round in December 2020, and they won't want to IPO in a recession. And IPOing is going to be a political act, and if I were them I would hesitate to incur the CCP's wrath.

>Facebook would sink someday

That day is very far into the future (in tech terms). 1.96 billion users are a whole fucking lot of a base to bleed. I would bet actual money that they won't dip below 1 billion by 2035, and that they would be still there (in whatever profitable form) with the same trademak in 2050.

Why would ByteDance IPO?

Is it taking over the same space though? I use Facebook because it's the only place I can see the schedules at my gym, or the menus as many local restaurants despite them not having updated their Facebook page in two years. As far as I know Tiktok doesn't really try to compete against these things.

Good luck. TikTok is amazing.

Facebook tries so hard to push junk and noise content at you it’s ridiculous. They’ve become a parody of themselves, and the obvious knockoff of TikTok looks pitiful.

You can hate Facebook all you want, but it's quite the stretch to call TikTok "amazing". It's very addictive, while the algo knows what you want, but that's mostly it.

Obviously anecdotal and personal opinion here, but me & many other people I know tried it a bit, spent MANY hours mindlessly scrolling, and eventually got bored. Nonetheless, it's still growing like a wildfire, but I deeply suspect it'll be a very, very fast fire. Which is a deep irony, since Facebook is following TikTok into the same cliff.

We do share a disdain for the DataKraken, yet META dominated in June '22 across the most downloaded apps. [1]

[1] https://app.finclout.io/t/b9BbQa4

> TikTok is really taking over and is a force.

So that means what? That other social medias can't exist unless they are on the absolute top? Sounds like a race to the bottom, patched up with investor creole language bullshit.

Did you forget how Friendster and the ones before lost their user base overnight? Facebook was not in that situation because so far there hasn’t been a worthy competitor. They bought the last two, and it’s not possible with TikTok. Facebook is pissing it’s meta pants.

I didn't forget. I also didn't forget that they burned all of their money, and didn't pay their taxes. I think you're extrapolating a lot from nothing.

Sorry, why is creole being referenced here?

Is this an inside joke/reference I'm not familiar with?

Is it a typo?

Edit: Thank you all for the replies. I am aware of and respectful of the literal definition.

The usage on the comment I responded to strikes me as either antiquated, inaccurate, or a typo.

'creole' has developed a linguistic meaning that parallels the ethnic one you may be interpreting.

From Wikipedia: a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language.

I still found the comment to be a bit of a stretch with that usage.

You all need to get out of Silicon Valley. Creole languages, such as Jamaican are not only completely normal and exist, it's actually not antiquated if you look outside of the US.

I do think you need to read more about this. You seem hung up on a singular meaning, which to me says a lot more about you than me. In this context, unless you're going to be obnoxiously pandentic, creole simply means "a bunch of words and phrases smashed together" Really not worth going into highschool mode about.

Creole language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language

I think patois may be a better word

I'd assume they're referencing it being something like a pidgin language.

> Facebook just doesn't respect its users or care about their needs.

Not only that, they're actually killing and destroying art forms. Many forms of art don't lend themselves to 15-second videos, and they're being actively downranked and not even shown to their own friends and followers anymore. Facebook is gatekeeping content between friends. You could have spent 500 hours painting a picture but Facebook will HIDE it from your friends just because it isn't a 15-second "Reel".

Zuck: "We want Reels to be the best place for creators to connect with their community and make a living"

Well, did you even bother asking the creators? A lot of them CANNOT make a living through short videos. They need still pictures, writing, interactive pages, and other ways to present their creations.

No, Zuck, you don't want it to the best place for creators. You actually don't give a flying f about creators. You just want to copy and compete with TikTok.

I do a lot of landscape photography and astrophotography, and my views have been slashed to 1/3 of what they were last year. Same quality content, it's Instagram HIDING stuff from my own followers and friends. I'm just glad I don't make a living from it, but feel really bad for those who do.

Yep, rather than focusing on how they are are different in providing value (connecting people) they are chasing attention and ad revenue. It’s sad because that type of person to person social connection is being relegated back to instant messengers which still function more or less like the ones from the 2000s.

> It’s sad because that type of person to person social connection is being relegated back to instant messengers which still function more or less like the ones from the 2000s.

What about mixing forum-like experience with open messaging? That's what we're doing over at https://sqwok.im

The person to person interaction went back to messengers because most people don’t like the exposure of all their social interactions being laid bare for all to see.

I guess you haven’t been using Telegram. It introduces new useful features every year.

TBH this is also exactly what Google tried to do with Google+ back in the day. Facebook was a new model that provided online folks with a new and more personal experience, which scared Google management, so they tried to pivot the whole company to become a social network, including forcing their users to abandon their pseudonyms and reveal their irl identity, despite the original implicit social contract allowing pseudonyms. It was idiotic. You would think Facebook would have learned from their primary competitor's (at the time) mistake.

To quote the article Facebook really has "unleashed waves of democratic empowerment" among the youth in certain countries where democracy is not present or is under serious assault and the domestic media is censored. If some random dictatorship has strict anti-speech laws Meta is way more lax about following them than the domestic media (who are just going to get arrested if they don't). This really has created a generation of young people in some places who have a less censored view of the world and have a more pro-democratic, pro-egalitarian, anti-dictatorship bent. The only people who miss this are the ones whose reality is generally confined to an e.g. US-only point of view where democracy is secure and stable and the only "threats" to it are basically a joke, like the whole panic over January 6, and you've never seen tanks roll into the capital and depose your elected officials.

In countries where real threats to democracy like that exist, Facebook and Twitter have played a huge role in communicating suppressed information, aiding protest organization, etc. and by and large the kids are into it.

As for a pivot to a Tiktok-style experience -- that's a hard pass for me, it's like mixing cocaine with television. The kids are into that too and it's pretty scary to watch them switch off their brains, set aside their humanity and obediently wait for the ML algorithm's function calls to twitch_human_thumb() that arise every few seconds. Of course people were saying something similar about MTV, remote controls and the boob tube back in the day and somehow we survived...

Ultimately if you're Meta and the government tells you it's OK for you to sell cocaine, after all they're OK with your Chinese competitor importing it -- who are you to say no?

Under the current climate my only confusion is why we haven't let Coke reintroduce their namesake ingredient to their formula. Or to use your example yes I could totally see Taco Bell lacing their meat with drugs if it was allowed!

I agree with most of your point but why be dismissive of the very evident reality of how corroded democracy has become in the Western world in large part because of how Facebook-poisoned certain demographics and their elected representives have become?

https://twitter.com/USA_Polling/status/1552006668514369536

Two-thirds of respondents (67.2%, 95% CI 66.1%, 68.4%) perceived “a serious threat to our democracy,” but more than 40% agreed that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy” and that “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.” Half (50.1%) agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.”

Because frankly all of that stuff isn't really a big deal (and I knew I'd get a rise when I brought this up, couldn't help myself).

I've seen a coup staged firsthand, directly experienced it happening in a country I lived in, watched the tanks rolling down the road to the government district which they proceeded to occupy, and everything that came before and after.

In the US there are a lot of people with loony opinions out there, but fundamentally there's a military which is on the side of the elected government. There's an elections process which is too distributed to suspend or corrupt nationally (sure it can get screwed up locally and does). There's also a free media and Internet. These are the pillars that hold up both the good and bad democracies around the world.

People with a lot of anxiety will poke holes in all of those statements, they will list the ways the US is messed up because that's what they know. But it's just not the same as a country where the elected government actually falls. US institutions today are all vastly healthier today than the countries where that happens.

I think it's good to have some degree of anxiety because it pushes us to solve problems but the US just isn't having a civil war or having its civilian government replaced any time soon, I'd stake everything I own on it.

I'd recommend you take a long hard look around if you think fascism isn't possible in the US. The modern GOP is now predicated on a belief that the last election was stolen, and that they need to steal the next one to compensate. Fascism doesn't require a coup, and it's plausible that US fascism won't use one.

Here, have a podcast about the subject: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-307...

Of course fascism is coming to the US.

The US has always been fascist when it comes to international politics. First its reach was mostly limited to the Americas, but after World War 2 and the start of the Cold War, its fascist control spread across the globe.

It would be more of a surprise if the fascism they display internationally would never make it back to the US. After all, it is the same people making the decisions internationally and domestically, and the disappearance of the call logs from January 6th show that there are parts of the military open to negotiations.

Facebook doesn't respect it's users, it's staff, or it's retail investors. As the companies stock is currently structured it exists as Mark Zuckerberg's personal plaything and no one can get rid of him until he runs out of cash.

> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook

And nobody hates Facebook more than Facebook users. I don't use Facebook and because of that I don't have many problems with it. Same goes for the people that don't use Facebook that I know. The only people I see complaining about Facebook are Facebook users.

To give a counterexample of one, I've never been a user of Facebook (never signed up to FB, IG or WA) but I absolutely loathe the company and its sociopathic behaviour under Zuckerberg. I hate everything the company represents. I take an active interest in its travails and will celebrate its downfall.

I agree with that. I just mean I'm pretty much never directly interacting with Facebook so I don't have to think about them. People who use Facebook every day are constantly experiencing the terribleness directly. So yes, I hate Facebook, but luckily it's not a direct part of my life so I don't have to think about it.

This isn’t “Taco Bell outsold McDonald’s for six months so all of a sudden McD’s sells McTacos.” This is, “McDonald’s realizes about two years too late that no one wants to eat burgers anymore so in a last-ditch attempt they add tacos to the menu.”

Then you make burgers hip again. You extend the menu. You bring out cool new styles. You advertise hard. You give samples, you discount, you run specials, you collab with others. 100 things you can do to reinvigorate your 'boring Burger' business.

You don't just pivot to copycat the tacos business years late. Why would customers go to you rather than staying with their Taco brand of choice?

I believe the real world analogy would be that McDonalds started using real beef and chicken in their food, expanded out the breakfast menu hours. Which they did, deciding whether it strengthened their future prospects is an exercise best left up to each individual.

You laugh, but there are still franchisee owned stores selling McPizza and *the horror, the horror* McSalads.

Your analogy doesn't work because people /do/ like Tacos, and people /do/ like Facebook to not be TikTok. The proof is in the active users. Silicon Valley is such a self important circle jerk. You can operate a business, it lose users, and still exist. Christ.

Counterpoint: facebook are going to add the classic chronological friends and family experience as a second tab “feeds”. In your analogy it would be like mcdonalds splitting down the middle, with the main entrance leading you to tacodonalds and a side door from that hallway leading you to the classic mcdonalds. Parents could send their kids to tacodonalds for a burger taco because that’s what the kids love, while nearby they could enjoy a classic big mac. Most people would probably prefer it that way.

This is just diversification to reach more market segments, and as long as that feeds tab exists they aren’t doing anything different from e.g. youtube, where the home tab is not what I want at all, but the subscriptions tab does exactly what I want.

Not to mention the fact that the feed itself wasn't part of Facebook's original proposition but was a controversial change introduced despite user protests, and the content of the feed today doesn't remotely resemble the content of the feed in 2006 which doesn't remotely resemble the content of the feed in 2009 or 2015

If McDonalds had been a pizza joint within the memories of much of its user base before introducing a Big Mac which was chicken one year and beef the next with constant tweaks to the sauces and vegetable content, I'm not sure the introduction of tacos would be that controversial.

If Facebook was into that kind of thing, we would still have a proper chronological feed.

It'd be more like if McDonald's used the same ingredients and stuffed them into taco and burrito shapes and lazily renamed themselves to something like mcdonaria, had their employees say hola when you walk in and their receipts say gracias...

The issue is Facebook misunderstand both their customers and their competition so they're just blindly smashing things together

I blame modern tech hiring processes that filter out people who aren't conforming enthusiastic obedient cheerleaders.

You get a sustain and self-extinguish product instead of one that can respond to what the necessity of the times demand

You must have passionate grumps otherwise you're just shaking pom-poms as you run over a cliff.

> their customers

Just so we're clear, the users are NOT the customers. I think Facebook absolutely understands their customers -- the companies that spend the most advertising and marketing through Facebook.

All of the paying customers have Facebook accounts and most personally use them.

If it's a bad experience and "boosting" posts leads to noise and garbage they're going away.

The tiering of customers and users is incorrect, Facebook is the meeting place for the two sides of the attention market and they are increasingly doing a failed execution.

The clean delineated hierarchy model where the users are treated as foolish rubes is part of the problem. There's an insular Silicon Valley elitism that is excessively self-congratulatory and is positively allergic to systemic criticism

Have we already forgotten the aphorism "if the service is free, you are the product"?

I think the problem boils down to the same mantra as always: users are not customer, but product.

Poor comparison. McDonalds and Taco Bell are not as culturally divisive as Tik Tok and Facebook. Governments don't request nearly as much sensitive data from fast food chains as they do from modern IT companies. It's more like China having too much power over American citizens and Facebook desperately trying to overtake their market share, either for control or for a platform to fall back on once, or if, Tik Tok were to go under.

Poor comparison was also my first thought. Taco bell and McDonald's fundamentally do different things (although they seem to be expanding into each other turf with things like nacho fries), but Facebook and TikTok really don't, neither does Twitter or Instagram or any other social network (even email for that matter, the oldest social network).

They're communication tools. On all of these platforms you can post video, images, and text either privately or publicly. I can use Facebook the same way someone might use Twitter. I can post only images to TikTok or Facebook and forget about Instagram. I cannot buy a hamburger and taco bell, or tacos and tostada's at McDonald's.

A better comparison would be saying that Chili's saw Applebee's have a great year and decided to make the inside decor and outside building look more like Applebee's. Both restaurants basically serve a bit of all types of food and the menus probably overlap heavily.

Didn't Facebook already die years back? People moved onto Instagram, Whatsapp, Snap and a few other places already. The only reason Facebook was able to pull along was because it bought Insta and Whatsapp so they did not have to compete. But that now that they have to actually compete, the cracks are showing.

That's a strange take isn't it? Facebook has like twice the # of daily users as Instagram, and 6x that of Snap...

Tons still use Marketplace, Groups, etc. Especially in non-Western countries as well as older (40+) people.

>Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook

Not disputing that facebook is uniquely poison, but that's most sane users on social giants. Users of reddit and twitter specifically absolutely and openly loath them, users of instagram and linkedin are too stifled by the ultra-superficial cheeriness of the platforms to openly admit their hatred on the platform itself, but it's burning inside them quietly.

Socials are an amazing\terrifying experiments in how you can use the herd instincts of humans to hold them hostages against their will.

>Maybe you can still order the <burger> if you know to ask for it, but most people won't, and they'll leave disappointed instead of getting what they wanted.

You just described In&Out

Facts. I went to InNOut with a friend because he swore by it and I ordered first. I got a tasteless burger and he got one that actually had food between the buns. AND his fries looked actually edible. I was confused, asked which options he chose, and he said something about secret menus which pisses me off. Why must I be prepared with inside knowledge for a store that claims to be fast and easy? I ate my crappy meal and dont plan on going back when there are other places that are full willing to show you what meals are available

Had this same thought a few weeks ago too. Nothing short of contempt.

Yeah, apple went from selling personal computers to iPods, phones and headphones, where they make most of the money....

Would you have said the same for Apple back in 2007?

Ps. Restaurants change menus all the time.

Aside from iPods, which they have wisely cannibalized themselves with the iPhone, Apple still sells all those items, with headphones a Fortune 500 company all on its own.

It's not that Apple changed its menu, it expanded it.

Apple brought the sensibilities that made their computers interesting to other consumer electronics. Facebook seems to be doing the opposite and trying to mimic whatever's popular. The only "Facebook" sensibility they ever bring to the table seems to be figuring out ways to over-optimize and over-monetize until the golden-egg-laying-goose dies.

More like MTV non longer showing music videos imo. Facebook could have stayed your personal Rolodex and serve that use case but decided to chase engagement wherever it could.

Maybe it was inevitable and necessary to avoid death or maybe they abandoned their primary purpose and turned off their users and therefore the network / social graph from which they derived value.

Or maybe they will continue to print money.

That did happen! MTV was showing more 'reality shows' and such for a while as they were more successful. Then you had MTV2 and MTV3 showing actual music videos.

What killed MTV was youtube around 2007-2008, not another tv channel, but a completely different tech.

The change for Apple was a slow boiling pot. And initially you couldn’t even set up an iPhone without a computer (with Mac OS integration making it a lot smoother).

I'm now down to Facebook on my phone only, and it gets checked once or twice a day, and the first N posts are all "not friends" - group posts, ads, surveys.

There's hardly any of my friends left actively using it.

All my friends are now in fb messenger groups, whatsapp groups, discord, and so on.

Until they get "monetized", then we'll be off to somewhere else I suppose.

> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess. :-/

Beg to differ there. Facebook should be broken up and senior execs facing charges. [1] Loads of people think so and has been motivating for many to delete their account. Don't overlook that group of people. (There are dozens of us, DOZENS!)

[1] In weaker moments this can be expressed with rather more venom.

I have a feeling that 1) this is a global phenomenon 2) it's due to computing lightness (it costs few energy to change programs and websites compared to physical things).

Google keeps swinging secondary apps in and out of existence, social networks come and go every 5 years. It's low energy high frequency, low integration and unstable.

Well yes

But Facebook is trying to get new users

Correct about the fairy tale of endless growth

But they just need to convince shareholders for a couple quarters so a couple employees don’t get collateral called on shares they borrowed against and the corporation can dilute more shares issued on behalf of the same employees

And its going to work, long enough

> Can you imagine if brick-and-mortar businesses tried to do this?

The difference is that, similarly to how social networks grow exponentially when things are going well, they lose users even faster when things are going bad. There are tons of academic papers explaining this.

McDonald’s does remove menu items that a vocal minority of customers happen to enjoy. They freak out, everybody else shrugs, and the world moves on.

Also TikTok is dope and I only go to Facebook to see ads for clothes and other stuff I might want to buy.

> I only go to Facebook to see ads for clothes and other stuff I might want to buy.

That's interesting. It never occurred to me that people would use Facebook that way.

I understand that they think growth is in the younger users, but I can't see granny creating twerking videos. There is a sizable chunk of people that just want to post text and look at pictures of their relatives.

> Maybe you can still order the Big Mac if you know to ask for it, but most people won't

Lazy people need to own their laziness. What alternative is there? The UI can’t get infinitely complex.

I don't think they hate them, they - I believe that despite hoarding all this supposedly useful data - simply have absolutely no idea who they are and what they want/need.

The brick and mortar is a good example because if they did what Facebook is doing fewer may have gone bankrupt when they were destroyed by Amazon.

I’m not a fan of the ad driven business model and the damage it’s done, but Zuckerberg and Facebook are correct here. They know the users better than the users know themselves. It’s been true since the launch of the news feed.

Don’t listen to what users say, watch how they behave.

Everyone says they want to be fit but people just sit around and eat chocolate cake.

Zuckerberg has reorganized and saved Facebook a few times now despite hysterics from users and the press. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.

Irony. McDonald's was instrumental in creating Chipotle -- literally making burritos & tacos. Not at all dissimilar from Facebook & Instagram.

Hum... Just like any SaaS company out there.

I wonder if somebody will create a "keep track of your friends" application again. There is obviously a need, but there isn't a channel that enables it to appear anymore, unless Google allows (hum... that's how industries die).

Anyway, user hostile is how any software acts nowadays. From becoming difficult to interact with, exploiting the user on unexpected ways, all the way into refusing to fulfill its primary use case. Users don't seem to care.

I'm failing to understand:

Why is any of this news!?

Facebook (and Instagram) has been using an algorithmic discovery engine for years, hasn't it?

Facebook cares about their customers, which are the companies that want to use its AD network.

Users are not customers.

> Nobody hates Facebook users more than Facebook, I guess

I was immediately reminded of Mozilla when I read this.

I'm already there for McDonalds. No idea how to order what I want from those machines.

They are a complete disaster. Unusable.

Pro tip, you will get better service in the Drive-Thru. The large majority of their sales come from there, and they prioritize filling drive thru orders to keep the line moving.

I wonder who hates their product more - Facebook or Twitter?

They are driven by the numbers, the numbers cant be wrong.

Restaurants do sometimes change their menus, you know

if as a result McDonald's has an amazing growth in revenue, sure this will happen it's just a matter of when

They're building it back better.

I think Facebook user numbers could drop just as fast as they rose. The network effects that drive a social network to add members could operate in reverse as well when higher engagement users drop and the remaining users either leave or become dormant.

All of those restaurants sell poisonous trash.

Which makes this a good analogy for social media. We should all be happy they may finally be peaking and fading.

Except that TikTok is going strong[0], and is arguably just as bad.

0: https://radar.cloudflare.com/#most-popular-domains

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