7 ms·

Hit the nail on the head there. It’s impossible to actually get what was the damn promise of Facebook to begin with, and instead everyone gets practically drugg

Hit the nail on the head there. It’s impossible to actually get what was the damn promise of Facebook to begin with, and instead everyone gets practically drugged with crap because it makes Mark more money.

mlang23 5y ago
Well, same applies to YouTube. Most of the ads I get in the past 6 months are absolutely borderline scam.
- noasaservice 5y ago
  Install ublock origin. No ads. Think of it as anti-malware for the web.
mszcz 5y ago
Aside from the mountains of odorless excrement I started seeing on facebook, this was the other reason I quit. It became unusable because once I scrolled past something it was next to impossible to find it again by either scrolling up or searching. Instead of seeing what people were up to I started seeing things they thought would keep me on the platform for as long as possible. Looking at it now, at least to me, it seems obvious that the purpose of facebook has changed from "make money by showing people what their friends are up to" to "keep those dumb fucks as long as possible by whatever means possible to make as much fucking money as possible, everything else be dammed". And this is being generous with their beginning.
- bihaqo 5y ago
  Yes! I always wanted smart feeds to have "search in the posts you've seen" feature, why can't they just do it?
  - mszcz 5y ago
    I'd guess that it's better for engagement for you to keep looking for it for minutes on end. Who knows, maybe you'll happen upon just the right, rage-inducing, useless post that might keep you on for longer.
- worldsayshi 5y ago
  I'm curious if when most people say they "quit" Facebook they removed their account or if they just stopped using it. It feels like most people I know has stopped using it, except for messenger, but almost no-one has actually removed or closed down their account.
  - mszcz 5y ago
    I didn't close the account. Once in a blue moon (once in a quater) I'll need to look up some shitty business's only online presence on facebook or contact someone on messenger.
    - frodetb 5y ago
      I did close mine completely, early this January, and have since only occasionally been affected when encountering businesses like the ones you describe. However, I view those occasions as a chance to push back against that bad trend, reminding them that there are people willing to give them money that they simply won't reach. While the push is small and they probably have already accounted for this loss in their strategies, I think it is better than nothing.
      - mszcz 5y ago
        > reminding them I hear you but I'm past that phase. "They" don't listen. It's not worth my time and energy being angry and going down that rabbit hole to "remind them" (my base anger level is high enough :P). Why? "They" don't have the capacity to listen. It's not in their interest to make their product better for you. You think you can't scroll back and see what you saw just a second ago because it's a really challenging technical problem? You think you can't set your home and work location in google Maps when you have location tracking disabled because it's a really complex problem? No. They'll listen when they'll get their teeth kicked in by a regulator. I'm just glad that they consistently keep fucking up, even in the face of mounting negative sentiment.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    I did close mine. But yeah it happens a lot.
lambdasquirrel 5y ago
I don’t know if I’d be cynical in that particular way. Maybe the real cynicism is more banal. FB was and always will be “viral.” When Zuck was in college, this pretty much amounted to stalking all your classmates (for those who remember when it was university students only). Zuck is getting towards middle age now. “News” is the new viral. We want to believe that FB is a corporation and therefore must act with a certain economic logic, but within the bounds of what can be optimized for the bottom line, there can often be a huge amount of room for founder neuroses, fantasies, etc. (I mean cmon, Jeff Bezos literally just went to space. And if you like history, remember William Randolph Hearst?) Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself. It was the core neuroses. Money just happens to be the thing people “universally” care about in middle life, as opposed to university life, but that much is an outgrowth of the neuroses.
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  > Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself I don't think this is a useful way to summarise it. You could say any business' main gig is not making money if you want to (this bank isn't about making money; we just intrinsically love signing people up to financial services!) I don't know if it adds anything, and I think it does subtract.
  - lambdasquirrel 5y ago
    There are some companies that are set up to make money. Most of the banks in existence exist to make money and they won’t hesitate to say so, and they will say that they want to make you money too. Facebook was not created to make money. It came about from the era when people thought, just grow really big and figure out how to monetize later. It was not yet established that you could monetize something after making it big (which was a thing in the dot-com bust of 2001). It seems targeted advertising like a given today but back in 2011 (a decade ago, and not long after DoubleClick was bought by Google), this was still being established. It took a long, long time for FB to monetize. To that end, you need to have been there in the thick of it. Back then it may have seen like it was fun and games. Playing silly “viral” “games” was a big chunk of how people were spending time, back in 2008. But more than FB’s specific case, founder’s personas can be a bit unappreciated as the guiding hand in what happens with the company. We know that founder disagreements are a large percentage of startup failure. It really come down to the people, and their base impulses. Which is so trite and petty, but sometimes life just is.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Facebook was actually pretty good when it just showed me my friends posts and nothing else. But when they moved to their 'timeline' and started fiddling with algorithms that try to decide what I want to see, they got it all wrong and it became a chore to wade through it all. I don't understand how they think an algorithm can decide better what I want to see than me myself (by adding friend and blocking the ones that irritate me). In the end they lost me as a customer(or... Product :) ) altogether and I assume that's not their end-goal.
- barrenko 5y ago
  Same with Twitter.
  - shafyy 5y ago
    On Twitter you can just switch off the algorithm and see all posts from the accounts you follow in chronological order.
  - realusername 5y ago
    Twitter is just an hopeless platform really, the combination of commenting out of context (everything is out of context), low character count, lack of scoping & zero moderation (beside the most illegal stuff) is just a recipe for disaster, you even have external websites to enable you to read threads... Unlike Facebook, I'm not even sure Twitter is fixable.
- broeng 5y ago
  "You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!" - Eagles ;-)
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Yeah Facebook was great back in 2006 when you only really had your friends on there. I think the real downfall was not that they added the timeline, it's that it's impolite to not accept friend requests from e.g. coworkers or relatives that you know but don't really care about. And then you end up with a news feed full of people you don't care about. I think by the time they added "unfollow" options everybody had moved to WhatsApp where conversations are between 15 people you know quite well rather than 300 people you met once. I have no idea how they can fix that, or even how they could have prevented it. Google clearly foresaw that problem with their "circles" feature.

mlang23 5y ago

Well, same applies to YouTube. Most of the ads I get in the past 6 months are absolutely borderline scam.

noasaservice 5y ago
Install ublock origin. No ads. Think of it as anti-malware for the web.

mszcz 5y ago

Aside from the mountains of odorless excrement I started seeing on facebook, this was the other reason I quit. It became unusable because once I scrolled past something it was next to impossible to find it again by either scrolling up or searching. Instead of seeing what people were up to I started seeing things they thought would keep me on the platform for as long as possible. Looking at it now, at least to me, it seems obvious that the purpose of facebook has changed from "make money by showing people what their friends are up to" to "keep those dumb fucks as long as possible by whatever means possible to make as much fucking money as possible, everything else be dammed". And this is being generous with their beginning.

bihaqo 5y ago
Yes! I always wanted smart feeds to have "search in the posts you've seen" feature, why can't they just do it?
- mszcz 5y ago
  I'd guess that it's better for engagement for you to keep looking for it for minutes on end. Who knows, maybe you'll happen upon just the right, rage-inducing, useless post that might keep you on for longer.
worldsayshi 5y ago
I'm curious if when most people say they "quit" Facebook they removed their account or if they just stopped using it. It feels like most people I know has stopped using it, except for messenger, but almost no-one has actually removed or closed down their account.
- mszcz 5y ago
  I didn't close the account. Once in a blue moon (once in a quater) I'll need to look up some shitty business's only online presence on facebook or contact someone on messenger.
  - frodetb 5y ago
    I did close mine completely, early this January, and have since only occasionally been affected when encountering businesses like the ones you describe. However, I view those occasions as a chance to push back against that bad trend, reminding them that there are people willing to give them money that they simply won't reach. While the push is small and they probably have already accounted for this loss in their strategies, I think it is better than nothing.
    - mszcz 5y ago
      > reminding them I hear you but I'm past that phase. "They" don't listen. It's not worth my time and energy being angry and going down that rabbit hole to "remind them" (my base anger level is high enough :P). Why? "They" don't have the capacity to listen. It's not in their interest to make their product better for you. You think you can't scroll back and see what you saw just a second ago because it's a really challenging technical problem? You think you can't set your home and work location in google Maps when you have location tracking disabled because it's a really complex problem? No. They'll listen when they'll get their teeth kicked in by a regulator. I'm just glad that they consistently keep fucking up, even in the face of mounting negative sentiment.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I did close mine. But yeah it happens a lot.

lambdasquirrel 5y ago

I don’t know if I’d be cynical in that particular way. Maybe the real cynicism is more banal. FB was and always will be “viral.” When Zuck was in college, this pretty much amounted to stalking all your classmates (for those who remember when it was university students only). Zuck is getting towards middle age now. “News” is the new viral. We want to believe that FB is a corporation and therefore must act with a certain economic logic, but within the bounds of what can be optimized for the bottom line, there can often be a huge amount of room for founder neuroses, fantasies, etc. (I mean cmon, Jeff Bezos literally just went to space. And if you like history, remember William Randolph Hearst?) Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself. It was the core neuroses. Money just happens to be the thing people “universally” care about in middle life, as opposed to university life, but that much is an outgrowth of the neuroses.

robertlagrant 5y ago
> Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself I don't think this is a useful way to summarise it. You could say any business' main gig is not making money if you want to (this bank isn't about making money; we just intrinsically love signing people up to financial services!) I don't know if it adds anything, and I think it does subtract.
- lambdasquirrel 5y ago
  There are some companies that are set up to make money. Most of the banks in existence exist to make money and they won’t hesitate to say so, and they will say that they want to make you money too. Facebook was not created to make money. It came about from the era when people thought, just grow really big and figure out how to monetize later. It was not yet established that you could monetize something after making it big (which was a thing in the dot-com bust of 2001). It seems targeted advertising like a given today but back in 2011 (a decade ago, and not long after DoubleClick was bought by Google), this was still being established. It took a long, long time for FB to monetize. To that end, you need to have been there in the thick of it. Back then it may have seen like it was fun and games. Playing silly “viral” “games” was a big chunk of how people were spending time, back in 2008. But more than FB’s specific case, founder’s personas can be a bit unappreciated as the guiding hand in what happens with the company. We know that founder disagreements are a large percentage of startup failure. It really come down to the people, and their base impulses. Which is so trite and petty, but sometimes life just is.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Facebook was actually pretty good when it just showed me my friends posts and nothing else. But when they moved to their 'timeline' and started fiddling with algorithms that try to decide what I want to see, they got it all wrong and it became a chore to wade through it all. I don't understand how they think an algorithm can decide better what I want to see than me myself (by adding friend and blocking the ones that irritate me). In the end they lost me as a customer(or... Product :) ) altogether and I assume that's not their end-goal.

barrenko 5y ago
Same with Twitter.
- shafyy 5y ago
  On Twitter you can just switch off the algorithm and see all posts from the accounts you follow in chronological order.
- realusername 5y ago
  Twitter is just an hopeless platform really, the combination of commenting out of context (everything is out of context), low character count, lack of scoping & zero moderation (beside the most illegal stuff) is just a recipe for disaster, you even have external websites to enable you to read threads... Unlike Facebook, I'm not even sure Twitter is fixable.
broeng 5y ago
"You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave!" - Eagles ;-)
IshKebab 5y ago
Yeah Facebook was great back in 2006 when you only really had your friends on there. I think the real downfall was not that they added the timeline, it's that it's impolite to not accept friend requests from e.g. coworkers or relatives that you know but don't really care about. And then you end up with a news feed full of people you don't care about. I think by the time they added "unfollow" options everybody had moved to WhatsApp where conversations are between 15 people you know quite well rather than 300 people you met once. I have no idea how they can fix that, or even how they could have prevented it. Google clearly foresaw that problem with their "circles" feature.