Facebook has been product-managed and algorithmed to death - two real sicknesses of short-term thinking common in SV companies. If you've used Facebook continu

Facebook has been product-managed and algorithmed to death - two real sicknesses of short-term thinking common in SV companies. If you've used Facebook continuously for the last decade, you won't notice as much because the changes have been gradual. But if you came to Facebook now as a new user, it's all but incomprehensible. Combined with being "the place your parents hang out", it's no surprise that no one new wants to join Facebook or understands why they would want to be there. Here are three concrete examples of these diseases: 1. Comments on posts and groups are shown out of order using relevance ranking. You just see the fragments of conversation that are most likely to get you to click and write an enraged reply without any context. No sane designer would ever choose this design for a message posting system. It's clear that a PM ran an A/B test and is optimizing for short term "engagement numbers" and doesn't care at all if you can actually have a normal discussion with their product. Juicing engagement drives users away in the long term. 2. Since the visibility of nearly all content is algorithmic, the shittiest content rises to the top automatically. If you are friends with people who work on products like YouTube, they will tell you privately that the reason there are so many conspiracy videos suggested by YouTube is because crazy people click on ads at an absurdly high rate compared to the general public which makes that content very valuable to the algorithm and drives it to the top unless the penalize it artificially. The same thing happens all over Facebook. Human misery and lowest common denominator content rises to the top because it gets clicks. Again, you are juicing short-term engagement but driving away users in the long term when misery fatigue sets in. 3. Facebook has so many overlapping features and no clear product vision. PMs have slapped on feature after feature with little consideration for the overall product. You can literally feel the PMs fighting over screen space in the web page layout. For example on my default landing page, I have a live chat sidebar, a widget to post "Stores" and separate a widget to post "Posts", separate links to "Watch", "Live Video" and "Gaming Video", a link to "Marketplace" despite a totally separate link to something called "Buy and Sell Groups" and yet another one called "Offers", and all manner of bizarre and creepy sounding stuff like "Town Hall" and "Messenger Kids"(!). There's even some bullshit about a "Friendiversary" and a separate "Memories" tab. There must be 100+ separate "Products" on the screen that I can navigate into. Who is Facebook for?? If Facebook is going to survive as a viable place for people to hang out, someone with a clear product vision needs to be put in charge and the product needs to be severely stripped down and de-algorithmed. But of course that will never happen in a giant company, so instead Instagram will eventually overtake Facebook because it's actually still somewhat usable. But then Instagram itself will be PMed and algorithmed to death and replaced by something else. It's the corporate lifecycle.