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Funny or Die's Matt Klinman: “Facebook has destroyed independent digital comedy”

143 points by petethomas 9y ago

dingo_bat 9y ago
> It’s the Jurassic Park lesson: Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. I sympathize with the main point in the article. But this statement is stupid in the extreme. You should do everything you can.
- adrianN 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure you can jump off a high building, but I would not recommend that you actually do it.
  - snag 9y ago
    sssshhh! coughnatural selectioncough
    - sctb 9y ago
      Please stop posting unsubstantive comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
MaxBarraclough 9y ago
TL;DR: Comedy isn't dying - that's just clickbait bullshit - but Facebook is making it difficult for independent comedy websites to survive, and content-producers can't monetize. The article fails to distinguish the web from the Internet. Interesting read, though. I would've thought it would be in Facebook's interest to become a good 'hub' for comedy. Maybe things will improve. (Ideally of course, things wouldn't 'improve' in the direction of silos like Facebook.)
- lmm 9y ago
  > Interesting read, though. I would've thought it would be in Facebook's interest to become a good 'hub' for comedy. It is in Facebook's interest. I'm sure Facebook would be willing to spend money to make Facebook offer a better comedy experience for their users. But why would they pay comedy producers when plenty of equally high-quality comedy is submitted there without them paying anything? As for offering a consistent interface, that's a feature rather than a bug, and as a Facebook user it's one I appreciate.
- gaius 9y ago
  The article fails to distinguish the web from the Internet To us geeks that is a fundamental thing but the target market for this content doesn’t know or care - they think “the Internet” is FB/Google/ YouTube/Twitter and that’s it
thisisit 9y ago
> they are favoring things that are clickbait, things that are optimized for Facebook, low-quality things that appeal to the lowest common denominator and, honestly, just things at random Isn't that the Internet nowadays? I mean the article headline is a good example. The correct version might have been more explanatory about the content like "interview with" or "Funny or Die lays off" or even about "online comedy" but they still went for a more click baity headline about Facebook killing all the comedy in the world.
mlazos 9y ago
I always enjoy reading the opinions of people who aren’t in tech. It always reminds me how little the world really understands the devices and programs they run every single day and how much of a bubble I live in. At the point where he said there should be a law that recommendations need to be made by humans it’s like dude, there’re 2 billion people using this site, that ship has sailed, we’re at tragedy of the commons-level shit right now. I do agree with him for the most part though, I just can’t see a solution other than users not using Facebook anymore or somehow banding together and forcing the recommendation engine to show us higher quality content by only clicking on higher quality content which is a sadly far-fetched idea at this point. I can only hope that people start to limit themselves.
- alphaalpha101 9y ago
  Facebook doesn't have a right to exist. If the law were changed then they could follow it by just not recommending things to people. Or hiring some people with their untold billions of dollars.
- naravara 9y ago
  Facebook just persists on the inertia of the network effect its leveraging. The only thing that will ever stop them is actual updates to anti-trust laws to stay in step with the current state of the industry. It’s bullshit that a single company should get to pick winners and losers in the economy. We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically elected government do that so I don’t understand why proponents of free-markets think it’s fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the same kind of influence.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    >> We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically elected government do that so I don’t understand why proponents of free-markets think it’s fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the same kind of influence. Only a handful of people get to call themselves President, Senator, or Congressperson. Fewer will ever be billionaires, but more can dream because there's no constitutional limit to quantity or term length. They aspire to create the next unaccountable corporate entity.
zerostar07 9y ago
i wonder if someone has researched the eternal september problem in depth to prove if there is or there isn't a solution.
- pharke 9y ago
  The solution for colleges was to only allow a limited number of admissions at one point in the year. Perhaps that could work again, have some number of spots to be filled that is a fraction of the current population and prioritize applicants based on their ability to perform some action such as writing a coherent essay or proving some stake in the community.
awalton 9y ago
s/Comedy/Online short-format video content/g. Facebook desperately needs to fix this situation - they've grossly mishandled their video solution in order to try to beat YouTube, and it's costing content creators billions. I can't imagine it will be too much longer before these people figure out a legal class and file a blockbuster lawsuit over it.
bambax 9y ago
> The other solution, which seems crazy, is for there to be a meta organizing campaign, where media companies band together and refuse to post on Facebook, essentially going on strike and withholding their labor until they are compensated. But why are media companies still posting on FB today, if they don't get compensated for it?? What's the point? Eyeballs with no revenue?? Still, it seems many Youtube personalities are still making money from the videos they post on YT. Why can't others do the same?
- MaxBarraclough 9y ago
  > Eyeballs with no revenue? Presumably so. Recognition/fame/having a loyal following are going to be of great value to modern stand-up comedians. I imagine Facebook's non-monetized videos are more of an issue for someone using online videos as their primary source of revenue (i.e. YouTube personalities). My understanding is that the music industry has been that way ever since music recordings could be published - top musicians make most of their money from performances, and only a small amount from royalties, but without the recordings they'd never have the large performances.
  - jonbarker 9y ago
    Actually the Grateful Dead pioneered this approach. People thought they were crazy giving recordings away.
    - deadbunny 9y ago
      Which works if you have a secondary method of making money (live shows, merch) which I doubt a lot of people making short comedy videos do.
- pferde 9y ago
  > Still, it seems many Youtube personalities are still making money from the videos they post on YT. Why can't others do the same? Actually, there is a trend in past few months of YT personalities either moving to other sources of monetization, or stopping to bother uploading to YT completely. For example lot of game streamers on Twitch, when asked why they upload so infrequently or not at all lately, they respond that it's not worth their while doing YT content anymore. I think it has to do with YT's latest changes to their policies about video monetization and demonetization, coupled with their (automated) handling of (automated) copyright infringement claims by 3rd parties.
Quarrelsome 9y ago
I feel like the whole LEAN mindset is also pushing this. Everyone is metrics, everyone is stats, you chase the numbers and fail to realise you might be making all your users miserable yet trapped.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
blowski 9y ago
Another way I think Facebook is killing comedy is the outrage every time a comedian makes an edgy joke. I recognise this isn't solely caused by or limited to Facebook, but social networking is definitely a contributing factor.
- croon 9y ago
  I don't know if you're referencing anything specific, but comedians being edgy has never been an issue. Comedians being edgy to cover for their lack of humor is. I've never been offended by a topic, but I have cringed at a lot of extremely bad jokes.
  - xaqfox 9y ago
    Top comedians seem to disagree with your absolute assertion. https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/10/living/seinfeld-comedy-colleges-feat/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/10/living/seinfeld-comedy-colleg... Also, I seemed to have missed that vote that granted you the role of humor police, judging all that is and is not funny.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - croon 9y ago
      The point of an algorithm is it can work regardless of what values you put into it (my opinion or someone elses). It's entirely possible that I don't have a good/common/high brow/low brow/whatever sense of humor (though I obviously think I have a great one), but the entire point I was making was: Am I as a comedian approaching this subject in the service of my joke/keen insight, or am I doing it for shock value/to be "edgy"? I guess the audience can never truly know, but that doesn't change the fact that it is often varying degrees of obvious.
      - blowski 9y ago
        That sounds like how a developer would approach comedy.
b1daly 9y ago
I agree very much with the interviewee that Facebook is a cultural wasteland, that provides one of the most enervating experiences on the internet. I think as a young person he doesn’t realize how it was a cultural anomaly that small time content producers could make money through independent production of mass media. Historically, from the development of mass media as an actual business category, getting your content distributed at all was tightly controlled by corporate “gate keepers” and was frankly a far more limiting situation for content creators of all stripes. I do find it remarkable that Facebook has figured out a way to obtain the vast majority of the add revenue for the content that streams through their platform. There are some unique aspects to the current structure, compared to earlier media business structures, that come from the incredible scope these advertising driven platforms have built. Ultimately, I do think it’s a “tragedy of the commons”situation, or at least a variation, where the market structure prevents optimal payments flowing to the creators, who are in fact appreciated by many. The only way around this would be some form of class organization by creators, a syndicate, Union, coop, cartel, something. The problem is that such a structure will be worked around by the many hungry and talented people out there who will sacrifice far more than you can believe for the chance to practice their craft.
- workthrowaway27 9y ago
  I'm not saying the current system is perfect, but a lot of these "gate keepers" are performing useful functions. Particularly for things like books and movies a major publisher or distributor gives some level of quality assurance. They also handle a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't expect an author or independent filmmaker to be good at.
  - msabalau 9y ago
    A good critic or festival programmer provides far more signal about quality than a publisher or distributor ever does. Sometimes gatekeepers are providing specialized services that creators might not be good at or interested in. In any event, Facebook manages to insert itself as a middle man while simultaneously lowering quality.
Tech-Noir 9y ago
Unlike others here, I don't sympathise with this at all, so this may be unpopular with some people. The complaint however seems to be: "we wanted Facebook to serve our interests, but Facebook wanted to serve their own interests for some inexplicable reason, so they suck". I loathe Facebook and think the internet and the world would be a better place without it. I also - for that reason - don't fucking use it (support it) and certainly don't work on content and then put it on Facebook, because it's bleedin' obvious you don't get to 1.5 billion users by supporting other sites. To cap it all, after all his whining, he's still a Facebook user to this day, simply kidding himself that he's sticking it to the man by impotently criticising it. As if anyone at Facebook cares what you do, so long as you do it on Facebook. Facebook is - still - not the internet. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it, and definitely don't put your hard work there. Meanwhile, if people stop visiting your site, maybe look closer to home instead of trying to lay the blame elsewhere. He's basically a million other dinosaurs who had early success with something and is now reduced to self-pity about the 'good old days' because his 15 minutes are up, and people have moved on to something else. Funny or die? Adapt or die.
- jktermp 9y ago
  "Adapt or die" — you must've thought how cool you are, while typing those words. Typical apologetic BS, by an imbecile from a tech-bro culture. Facebook should and must have responsibility for their actions and their platform. "He's basically a million other dinosaurs" — let's hope you won't become a "dinosaur" one day. No, you won't. You're so smart and edgy, right?
- WA 9y ago
  I agree, I got the same feeling from this. Furthermore, one might argue this is how it all went along anyways: - Some people start this website Funny or Die - They manage to get some money from it - They get a lot of traffic for free, because of Facebook and their sharing model - They hire more comedy writers - They feel entitled to be paid for their work, because apparently, it works - Facebook changes how they link to websites - Less people visit the website, less money for them, maybe because less people actually care about Funny or Die. Entitlement to get paid to be a comedy writer stays - Whiny post about evil Facebook (and about how brainless people are that they stopped visiting Funny or Die directly)
dhruvrrp 9y ago
The way I see it isn't Facebook that's killing comedy, it's the internet itself killing ways to monetize online comedy. The guy considers memes to be the future of internet comedy, well there are millions of people making them for free. And that just makes it harder for someone to monetize comedy. Additionally, all this free content being consumed by peoples is eating in the market share of more serious (professional?) sites like Funny or Die and the Onion.
- Tech-Noir 9y ago
  He's not saying memes are the future of comedy, he's complaining that people are making jokes for free: > the whole point of [Pitch] is to pay people for jokes because I hated seeing people just giving work away for free Perhaps people want to crack jokes for free, because it makes them feel good. Not everyone wants to monetize basic human interaction. If anything is killing anything it's monetization uber alles. So instead of people cracking jokes on internet forums or their local pub, he'd prefer it if they confined their material to his app instead, so he can financially benefit from it. That's the thing about a lot of Facebook haters. They don't really hate Facebook, they hate that they're not Facebook.
  - michaelt 9y ago
    If anything is killing anything it's monetization uber alles. I believe the traditional logic is: 1. X is good. 2. To achieve the best X, we should allow our best X people to dedicate their lives to it full time. 3. That means paying and equipping them, which needs revenue. 4. Therefore things that increase our revenue are good and things that decrease our revenue are bad. where X is almost anything in the entertainment industry, and quite a few things outside it too.
    - svantana 9y ago
      Ain't it funny though when people are for of a free market when it works in their favor, but against it when it doesn't? I.e. when you undercut someone else's price, that's a market miracle! When someone undercuts you, that's a race to the bottom, and a clear sign of the end of the golden age...
notmymain 9y ago
This whole debate seems to be missing the point. There has never been a world where independent content creators have been able to monetize what they do on a massive scale and collect most of the revenue. At a large scale, the owners of the distribution eat most of the pie. That's true because of basic comparative advantage and the advantages of scale even though they are entirely dependent on the individual content creators to get anything at all from their distribution. If the content creator wants to collect most/all of the revenue, the pie is small.
- ForRealsies 9y ago
  We all know that true independent digital comedy ended with YTMND. http://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/ytmnd http://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/ytmnd
- walshemj 9y ago
  Well some of the early Hollywood stars set up united artists including Chaplin to get round this problem
- settsu 9y ago
  No, he’s saying the internet upended the old funnel model by providing democratized global distribution to anyone, but now Facebook has not only largely reversed progress, they’ve done worse by profiteering on content they’ve assumed effectively zero cost, risk, or effort in distributing. Furthermore, they’ve destabilized democratic societies and radicalized neighbor against neighbor (speaking locally & globally.) Again, all the while, profiting from their carelessness, suffering few, if any, meaningful consequences.
  - notmymain 9y ago
    Sure, but that's fundamentally untrue. Facebook has gone to considerable effort and cost and taken great risk to build their network so that they can then monetize content that gets distributed on their platform. I'm not a fan of Facebook btw, but just that the argument the guy is making fails on basic economics.
_lex 9y ago
The problem is that facebook changed their business model (so you have to pay for people to see your content - he calls it payola), and a lot of content providers did not change their business models away from expecting free publicity from facebook. Really, all funny or die needed to do is to switch to a mailing list-type setup, where they actually can reach their customers without paying auction prices for every message. They should basically have given up on facebook as a means of reaching new customers, except for signing people up to their mailing list-type setup, and then trimmed operations to work at whatever scale that business could support, with the knowledge that they could grow that operation on a monthly basis to eclipse their facebook viewership. More content providers need to recognize that facebook sees their relationship as being zero sum, and that facebook controls all the cards in their own game, so it doesnt matter how many impressions/views you can get from facebook - they are the ones who benefit. You get to pay content generation costs.
- notyourday 9y ago
  I think it is a lot more fundamental than this. Facebook spent years building the unsexy stuff : a delivery platform that reaches eyeballs. Not only it works but it dwarfs all other delivery platforms. It was being laughed at by all serious content creators who thought they had avenue, the content and the brand loyalty. Now we clearly know that there's only one Facebook and there are tons of content creators and those content creators are 100% interchangeable according to the general public as the layoffs in content creator space indicate.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Being able to move from one video distribution platform to another or pivoting to a mailing list is not as easy as you purport and you may not have the numbers at the end of the day to keep the lights on.
- sarreph 9y ago
  By a 'mailing list-type setup', do you mean an actual email mailing list? In my opinion, such a suggestion is naïve, when the masses flock to Facebook/YouTube for their digital 'comical' content. I say this without a better suggestion myself, other than the obvious need for a purging of the endemic memeification of the Facebook News Feed.
kaolti 9y ago
Time for Steemit and D.tube
ohiovr 9y ago
How about a federated subscription? Form some kind of single login subscription model that supports several websites that are not necessarily corporately affiliated. The more sites in your federation the more clout it has. It could follow the fremium model to not turn everyone away yet allow the majority of good content to have a monitary return. I see this as an another potential answer to declining newspaper quality. The interent hasn't broken the law that says you get what you pay for.
- my_ghola 9y ago
  I think you just described flattr or patreon.
  - ohiovr 9y ago
    Thanks for that. I wonder why it isn't interesting for major newspapers.
downandout 9y ago
He didn’t articulate it well but the issue is the lack of organic reach given to page posts these days. Facebook has decided that fan page owners should pay to access their own fans - which negates the entire point of having a page or fans in the first place. The issue for Facebook is that as more and more publishers leave because they are getting no organic traffic, people will spend less time there. So this whole money grab may eventually backfire on them. If all publishers leave and only the social functions are left, is Facebook as attractive anymore? This is of course anecdotal, but many of my friends have not posted on there in years, and the ones that have average a post or update maybe every few months. That’s hardly worth sticking around for unless other interesting things remain in the ecosystem. I’d say that while people are jumping ship, 2018-2019 might be the first time that it is at least within the realm of possibility that someone could start a viable Facebook competitor. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
- msabalau 9y ago
  And of the remaining friends, some subtract value by the nature of their "engaged" content.
  - snowwrestler 9y ago
    Right. As a lot of social functions among close friends have moved to Instagram, Snapchat, or just group chats in messaging apps, what's left on Facebook? Your racist uncle, and high school friends you never talk to anymore.
- detaro 9y ago
  On the other hand, it could be that the social functions declined due to an overemphasis of news, companies, ... which people seem to feel increasingly unhappy about and might bounce back if they actually become visible on the site again. (Total speculation of course as well)
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  This is one of the reason why e-mail is still relevant in marketing: no gatekeepers asking you to pay for access to your audience.
debt 9y ago
I think saying it destroyed independent digital comedy is extremely incorrect. Memes have taken off and are now the primary form of digital comedy. They’re cheap to create and distribute(both photo and video forms). Memes are alive and well and very much a form indepdent digital comedy. Memes are wildly popular. Sometimes, most of the time?, memes are funnier than longer form digital content. I think Funny or Die didn’t evolve quick enough so wants to place the blame on Facebook and while I think some of what he says is undeniable true, how do you explain memes?
Feniks 9y ago
"I was just angry and frustrated and sad that you can’t make cool shit for the internet anymore and make a living". The internet existed before people made money from it. Plenty of cool shit back then.
xbmcuser 9y ago
I quit facebook years ago for this reason. Many people quit facebook for privacy reasons my main reason to quit was that facebook was consuming the open web. Where many businesses etc were using facebook as their main web presence. It allowed them to have low cost web presence but to me this was going to lead to death of the open web.

143 points by petethomas 9y ago

> It’s the Jurassic Park lesson: Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. I sympathize with the main point in the article. But this statement is stupid in the extreme. You should do everything you can.

adrianN 9y ago
I'm pretty sure you can jump off a high building, but I would not recommend that you actually do it.
- snag 9y ago
  sssshhh! coughnatural selectioncough
  - sctb 9y ago
    Please stop posting unsubstantive comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

MaxBarraclough 9y ago

TL;DR: Comedy isn't dying - that's just clickbait bullshit - but Facebook is making it difficult for independent comedy websites to survive, and content-producers can't monetize. The article fails to distinguish the web from the Internet. Interesting read, though. I would've thought it would be in Facebook's interest to become a good 'hub' for comedy. Maybe things will improve. (Ideally of course, things wouldn't 'improve' in the direction of silos like Facebook.)

lmm 9y ago
> Interesting read, though. I would've thought it would be in Facebook's interest to become a good 'hub' for comedy. It is in Facebook's interest. I'm sure Facebook would be willing to spend money to make Facebook offer a better comedy experience for their users. But why would they pay comedy producers when plenty of equally high-quality comedy is submitted there without them paying anything? As for offering a consistent interface, that's a feature rather than a bug, and as a Facebook user it's one I appreciate.
gaius 9y ago
The article fails to distinguish the web from the Internet To us geeks that is a fundamental thing but the target market for this content doesn’t know or care - they think “the Internet” is FB/Google/ YouTube/Twitter and that’s it

thisisit 9y ago

> they are favoring things that are clickbait, things that are optimized for Facebook, low-quality things that appeal to the lowest common denominator and, honestly, just things at random Isn't that the Internet nowadays? I mean the article headline is a good example. The correct version might have been more explanatory about the content like "interview with" or "Funny or Die lays off" or even about "online comedy" but they still went for a more click baity headline about Facebook killing all the comedy in the world.

mlazos 9y ago

I always enjoy reading the opinions of people who aren’t in tech. It always reminds me how little the world really understands the devices and programs they run every single day and how much of a bubble I live in. At the point where he said there should be a law that recommendations need to be made by humans it’s like dude, there’re 2 billion people using this site, that ship has sailed, we’re at tragedy of the commons-level shit right now. I do agree with him for the most part though, I just can’t see a solution other than users not using Facebook anymore or somehow banding together and forcing the recommendation engine to show us higher quality content by only clicking on higher quality content which is a sadly far-fetched idea at this point. I can only hope that people start to limit themselves.

alphaalpha101 9y ago
Facebook doesn't have a right to exist. If the law were changed then they could follow it by just not recommending things to people. Or hiring some people with their untold billions of dollars.
naravara 9y ago
Facebook just persists on the inertia of the network effect its leveraging. The only thing that will ever stop them is actual updates to anti-trust laws to stay in step with the current state of the industry. It’s bullshit that a single company should get to pick winners and losers in the economy. We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically elected government do that so I don’t understand why proponents of free-markets think it’s fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the same kind of influence.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  >> We get squeamish about allowing our (barely) democratically elected government do that so I don’t understand why proponents of free-markets think it’s fine to let an unaccountable corporate entity exert the same kind of influence. Only a handful of people get to call themselves President, Senator, or Congressperson. Fewer will ever be billionaires, but more can dream because there's no constitutional limit to quantity or term length. They aspire to create the next unaccountable corporate entity.

zerostar07 9y ago

i wonder if someone has researched the eternal september problem in depth to prove if there is or there isn't a solution.

pharke 9y ago
The solution for colleges was to only allow a limited number of admissions at one point in the year. Perhaps that could work again, have some number of spots to be filled that is a fraction of the current population and prioritize applicants based on their ability to perform some action such as writing a coherent essay or proving some stake in the community.

awalton 9y ago

s/Comedy/Online short-format video content/g. Facebook desperately needs to fix this situation - they've grossly mishandled their video solution in order to try to beat YouTube, and it's costing content creators billions. I can't imagine it will be too much longer before these people figure out a legal class and file a blockbuster lawsuit over it.

bambax 9y ago

> The other solution, which seems crazy, is for there to be a meta organizing campaign, where media companies band together and refuse to post on Facebook, essentially going on strike and withholding their labor until they are compensated. But why are media companies still posting on FB today, if they don't get compensated for it?? What's the point? Eyeballs with no revenue?? Still, it seems many Youtube personalities are still making money from the videos they post on YT. Why can't others do the same?

MaxBarraclough 9y ago
> Eyeballs with no revenue? Presumably so. Recognition/fame/having a loyal following are going to be of great value to modern stand-up comedians. I imagine Facebook's non-monetized videos are more of an issue for someone using online videos as their primary source of revenue (i.e. YouTube personalities). My understanding is that the music industry has been that way ever since music recordings could be published - top musicians make most of their money from performances, and only a small amount from royalties, but without the recordings they'd never have the large performances.
- jonbarker 9y ago
  Actually the Grateful Dead pioneered this approach. People thought they were crazy giving recordings away.
  - deadbunny 9y ago
    Which works if you have a secondary method of making money (live shows, merch) which I doubt a lot of people making short comedy videos do.
pferde 9y ago
> Still, it seems many Youtube personalities are still making money from the videos they post on YT. Why can't others do the same? Actually, there is a trend in past few months of YT personalities either moving to other sources of monetization, or stopping to bother uploading to YT completely. For example lot of game streamers on Twitch, when asked why they upload so infrequently or not at all lately, they respond that it's not worth their while doing YT content anymore. I think it has to do with YT's latest changes to their policies about video monetization and demonetization, coupled with their (automated) handling of (automated) copyright infringement claims by 3rd parties.

Quarrelsome 9y ago

I feel like the whole LEAN mindset is also pushing this. Everyone is metrics, everyone is stats, you chase the numbers and fail to realise you might be making all your users miserable yet trapped.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

blowski 9y ago

Another way I think Facebook is killing comedy is the outrage every time a comedian makes an edgy joke. I recognise this isn't solely caused by or limited to Facebook, but social networking is definitely a contributing factor.

croon 9y ago
I don't know if you're referencing anything specific, but comedians being edgy has never been an issue. Comedians being edgy to cover for their lack of humor is. I've never been offended by a topic, but I have cringed at a lot of extremely bad jokes.
- xaqfox 9y ago
  Top comedians seem to disagree with your absolute assertion. https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/10/living/seinfeld-comedy-colleges-feat/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/10/living/seinfeld-comedy-colleg... Also, I seemed to have missed that vote that granted you the role of humor police, judging all that is and is not funny.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - croon 9y ago
    The point of an algorithm is it can work regardless of what values you put into it (my opinion or someone elses). It's entirely possible that I don't have a good/common/high brow/low brow/whatever sense of humor (though I obviously think I have a great one), but the entire point I was making was: Am I as a comedian approaching this subject in the service of my joke/keen insight, or am I doing it for shock value/to be "edgy"? I guess the audience can never truly know, but that doesn't change the fact that it is often varying degrees of obvious.
    - blowski 9y ago
      That sounds like how a developer would approach comedy.

b1daly 9y ago

I agree very much with the interviewee that Facebook is a cultural wasteland, that provides one of the most enervating experiences on the internet. I think as a young person he doesn’t realize how it was a cultural anomaly that small time content producers could make money through independent production of mass media. Historically, from the development of mass media as an actual business category, getting your content distributed at all was tightly controlled by corporate “gate keepers” and was frankly a far more limiting situation for content creators of all stripes. I do find it remarkable that Facebook has figured out a way to obtain the vast majority of the add revenue for the content that streams through their platform. There are some unique aspects to the current structure, compared to earlier media business structures, that come from the incredible scope these advertising driven platforms have built. Ultimately, I do think it’s a “tragedy of the commons”situation, or at least a variation, where the market structure prevents optimal payments flowing to the creators, who are in fact appreciated by many. The only way around this would be some form of class organization by creators, a syndicate, Union, coop, cartel, something. The problem is that such a structure will be worked around by the many hungry and talented people out there who will sacrifice far more than you can believe for the chance to practice their craft.

workthrowaway27 9y ago
I'm not saying the current system is perfect, but a lot of these "gate keepers" are performing useful functions. Particularly for things like books and movies a major publisher or distributor gives some level of quality assurance. They also handle a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't expect an author or independent filmmaker to be good at.
- msabalau 9y ago
  A good critic or festival programmer provides far more signal about quality than a publisher or distributor ever does. Sometimes gatekeepers are providing specialized services that creators might not be good at or interested in. In any event, Facebook manages to insert itself as a middle man while simultaneously lowering quality.

Tech-Noir 9y ago

Unlike others here, I don't sympathise with this at all, so this may be unpopular with some people. The complaint however seems to be: "we wanted Facebook to serve our interests, but Facebook wanted to serve their own interests for some inexplicable reason, so they suck". I loathe Facebook and think the internet and the world would be a better place without it. I also - for that reason - don't fucking use it (support it) and certainly don't work on content and then put it on Facebook, because it's bleedin' obvious you don't get to 1.5 billion users by supporting other sites. To cap it all, after all his whining, he's still a Facebook user to this day, simply kidding himself that he's sticking it to the man by impotently criticising it. As if anyone at Facebook cares what you do, so long as you do it on Facebook. Facebook is - still - not the internet. If you don't like Facebook, don't use it, and definitely don't put your hard work there. Meanwhile, if people stop visiting your site, maybe look closer to home instead of trying to lay the blame elsewhere. He's basically a million other dinosaurs who had early success with something and is now reduced to self-pity about the 'good old days' because his 15 minutes are up, and people have moved on to something else. Funny or die? Adapt or die.

jktermp 9y ago
"Adapt or die" — you must've thought how cool you are, while typing those words. Typical apologetic BS, by an imbecile from a tech-bro culture. Facebook should and must have responsibility for their actions and their platform. "He's basically a million other dinosaurs" — let's hope you won't become a "dinosaur" one day. No, you won't. You're so smart and edgy, right?
WA 9y ago
I agree, I got the same feeling from this. Furthermore, one might argue this is how it all went along anyways: - Some people start this website Funny or Die - They manage to get some money from it - They get a lot of traffic for free, because of Facebook and their sharing model - They hire more comedy writers - They feel entitled to be paid for their work, because apparently, it works - Facebook changes how they link to websites - Less people visit the website, less money for them, maybe because less people actually care about Funny or Die. Entitlement to get paid to be a comedy writer stays - Whiny post about evil Facebook (and about how brainless people are that they stopped visiting Funny or Die directly)

dhruvrrp 9y ago

The way I see it isn't Facebook that's killing comedy, it's the internet itself killing ways to monetize online comedy. The guy considers memes to be the future of internet comedy, well there are millions of people making them for free. And that just makes it harder for someone to monetize comedy. Additionally, all this free content being consumed by peoples is eating in the market share of more serious (professional?) sites like Funny or Die and the Onion.

Tech-Noir 9y ago
He's not saying memes are the future of comedy, he's complaining that people are making jokes for free: > the whole point of [Pitch] is to pay people for jokes because I hated seeing people just giving work away for free Perhaps people want to crack jokes for free, because it makes them feel good. Not everyone wants to monetize basic human interaction. If anything is killing anything it's monetization uber alles. So instead of people cracking jokes on internet forums or their local pub, he'd prefer it if they confined their material to his app instead, so he can financially benefit from it. That's the thing about a lot of Facebook haters. They don't really hate Facebook, they hate that they're not Facebook.
- michaelt 9y ago
  If anything is killing anything it's monetization uber alles. I believe the traditional logic is: 1. X is good. 2. To achieve the best X, we should allow our best X people to dedicate their lives to it full time. 3. That means paying and equipping them, which needs revenue. 4. Therefore things that increase our revenue are good and things that decrease our revenue are bad. where X is almost anything in the entertainment industry, and quite a few things outside it too.
  - svantana 9y ago
    Ain't it funny though when people are for of a free market when it works in their favor, but against it when it doesn't? I.e. when you undercut someone else's price, that's a market miracle! When someone undercuts you, that's a race to the bottom, and a clear sign of the end of the golden age...

notmymain 9y ago

This whole debate seems to be missing the point. There has never been a world where independent content creators have been able to monetize what they do on a massive scale and collect most of the revenue. At a large scale, the owners of the distribution eat most of the pie. That's true because of basic comparative advantage and the advantages of scale even though they are entirely dependent on the individual content creators to get anything at all from their distribution. If the content creator wants to collect most/all of the revenue, the pie is small.

ForRealsies 9y ago
We all know that true independent digital comedy ended with YTMND. http://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/ytmnd http://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/ytmnd
walshemj 9y ago
Well some of the early Hollywood stars set up united artists including Chaplin to get round this problem
settsu 9y ago
No, he’s saying the internet upended the old funnel model by providing democratized global distribution to anyone, but now Facebook has not only largely reversed progress, they’ve done worse by profiteering on content they’ve assumed effectively zero cost, risk, or effort in distributing. Furthermore, they’ve destabilized democratic societies and radicalized neighbor against neighbor (speaking locally & globally.) Again, all the while, profiting from their carelessness, suffering few, if any, meaningful consequences.
- notmymain 9y ago
  Sure, but that's fundamentally untrue. Facebook has gone to considerable effort and cost and taken great risk to build their network so that they can then monetize content that gets distributed on their platform. I'm not a fan of Facebook btw, but just that the argument the guy is making fails on basic economics.

_lex 9y ago

The problem is that facebook changed their business model (so you have to pay for people to see your content - he calls it payola), and a lot of content providers did not change their business models away from expecting free publicity from facebook. Really, all funny or die needed to do is to switch to a mailing list-type setup, where they actually can reach their customers without paying auction prices for every message. They should basically have given up on facebook as a means of reaching new customers, except for signing people up to their mailing list-type setup, and then trimmed operations to work at whatever scale that business could support, with the knowledge that they could grow that operation on a monthly basis to eclipse their facebook viewership. More content providers need to recognize that facebook sees their relationship as being zero sum, and that facebook controls all the cards in their own game, so it doesnt matter how many impressions/views you can get from facebook - they are the ones who benefit. You get to pay content generation costs.

notyourday 9y ago
I think it is a lot more fundamental than this. Facebook spent years building the unsexy stuff : a delivery platform that reaches eyeballs. Not only it works but it dwarfs all other delivery platforms. It was being laughed at by all serious content creators who thought they had avenue, the content and the brand loyalty. Now we clearly know that there's only one Facebook and there are tons of content creators and those content creators are 100% interchangeable according to the general public as the layoffs in content creator space indicate.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Being able to move from one video distribution platform to another or pivoting to a mailing list is not as easy as you purport and you may not have the numbers at the end of the day to keep the lights on.
sarreph 9y ago
By a 'mailing list-type setup', do you mean an actual email mailing list? In my opinion, such a suggestion is naïve, when the masses flock to Facebook/YouTube for their digital 'comical' content. I say this without a better suggestion myself, other than the obvious need for a purging of the endemic memeification of the Facebook News Feed.

kaolti 9y ago

Time for Steemit and D.tube

ohiovr 9y ago

How about a federated subscription? Form some kind of single login subscription model that supports several websites that are not necessarily corporately affiliated. The more sites in your federation the more clout it has. It could follow the fremium model to not turn everyone away yet allow the majority of good content to have a monitary return. I see this as an another potential answer to declining newspaper quality. The interent hasn't broken the law that says you get what you pay for.

my_ghola 9y ago
I think you just described flattr or patreon.
- ohiovr 9y ago
  Thanks for that. I wonder why it isn't interesting for major newspapers.

downandout 9y ago

He didn’t articulate it well but the issue is the lack of organic reach given to page posts these days. Facebook has decided that fan page owners should pay to access their own fans - which negates the entire point of having a page or fans in the first place. The issue for Facebook is that as more and more publishers leave because they are getting no organic traffic, people will spend less time there. So this whole money grab may eventually backfire on them. If all publishers leave and only the social functions are left, is Facebook as attractive anymore? This is of course anecdotal, but many of my friends have not posted on there in years, and the ones that have average a post or update maybe every few months. That’s hardly worth sticking around for unless other interesting things remain in the ecosystem. I’d say that while people are jumping ship, 2018-2019 might be the first time that it is at least within the realm of possibility that someone could start a viable Facebook competitor. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.

msabalau 9y ago
And of the remaining friends, some subtract value by the nature of their "engaged" content.
- snowwrestler 9y ago
  Right. As a lot of social functions among close friends have moved to Instagram, Snapchat, or just group chats in messaging apps, what's left on Facebook? Your racist uncle, and high school friends you never talk to anymore.
detaro 9y ago
On the other hand, it could be that the social functions declined due to an overemphasis of news, companies, ... which people seem to feel increasingly unhappy about and might bounce back if they actually become visible on the site again. (Total speculation of course as well)
fwdpropaganda 9y ago
This is one of the reason why e-mail is still relevant in marketing: no gatekeepers asking you to pay for access to your audience.

debt 9y ago

I think saying it destroyed independent digital comedy is extremely incorrect. Memes have taken off and are now the primary form of digital comedy. They’re cheap to create and distribute(both photo and video forms). Memes are alive and well and very much a form indepdent digital comedy. Memes are wildly popular. Sometimes, most of the time?, memes are funnier than longer form digital content. I think Funny or Die didn’t evolve quick enough so wants to place the blame on Facebook and while I think some of what he says is undeniable true, how do you explain memes?

Feniks 9y ago

"I was just angry and frustrated and sad that you can’t make cool shit for the internet anymore and make a living". The internet existed before people made money from it. Plenty of cool shit back then.

xbmcuser 9y ago

I quit facebook years ago for this reason. Many people quit facebook for privacy reasons my main reason to quit was that facebook was consuming the open web. Where many businesses etc were using facebook as their main web presence. It allowed them to have low cost web presence but to me this was going to lead to death of the open web.